Elon Musk is now the world's first trillionaire. His company SpaceX went public on Friday in the biggest IPO in history, and shares shot up almost 20 percent on the first day.

The stock opened at $135 and climbed as high as $176 before closing at $161.50. That pushed SpaceX's market value above $2 trillion, putting it ahead of Tesla, Meta, and Walmart among America's most valuable companies.

SpaceX raised more than $75 billion by selling over 555 million shares. The offering was more than four times oversubscribed, according to Bloomberg. About 20 percent of shares were reserved for regular retail investors, and demand was high.

The IPO made thousands of SpaceX employees and early investors multi-millionaires or billionaires. Many staff who gathered at SpaceX's Starbase facility in Texas for the launch are now cashing in.

"SpaceX wants to be able to take you to the Moon, take you to Mars, and ultimately beyond," Musk said at the event. "I'm confident at this point that with the incredible team that we have here at SpaceX, that we will do that for you."

The company now trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker "SPCX." It's turned into a conglomerate that includes rockets, satellites, and Musk's AI company xAI, which owns the social media platform X and the Grok chatbot.

But the trillion-dollar valuation comes with huge risks. SpaceX is losing money — it reported a net loss of $4.9 billion in 2025, mostly from spending to build AI capacity. Revenue hit $18.7 billion. The company's own filing predicts it could eventually pull in $28.5 trillion in revenue from its various markets, a claim that sounds like science fiction.

A lot depends on Musk delivering on promises like putting data centers in space and sending humans to Mars using technology that hasn't been proven yet. SpaceX is also renting out its AI computing power to Anthropic and Google in short-term deals worth billions to help shore up its finances.

The IPO comes just over a year after Musk left President Donald Trump's administration, where he led the controversial "DOGE" effort to cut government spending. He also runs Tesla. His backing of Trump and right-wing populists in Europe, along with inflammatory posts on X, has made him a deeply polarizing figure.

Not everyone is celebrating. "The world will get its first trillionaire while Americans across the country are scraping together every dollar to save for retirement," said US Senator Elizabeth Warren.

The IPO is expected to kick off a wave of big public listings by AI companies. OpenAI and Anthropic have both filed initial documents with regulators and could go public later this year.

"The world will get its first trillionaire while Americans across the country are scraping together every dollar to save for retirement." — Senator Elizabeth Warren