SpaceX, Elon Musk's rocket company, starts trading on the Nasdaq today in what's already the biggest initial public offering in history. The company priced over 555 million shares at $135 each, raising more than $75 billion — smashing the previous record held by Saudi Aramco, which raised $29.4 billion in 2019. With options for nearly 83 million additional shares, the total could climb above $86 billion.
The IPO values SpaceX at just under $1.8 trillion, placing it ahead of Tesla, Meta, and Walmart in market value. The stock will trade under the ticker "SPCX." Executives are due to ring the opening bell at New York's Times Square, home of the Nasdaq.
For Musk, the listing is likely to push his personal wealth past $1 trillion, making him the world's first trillionaire. According to Forbes, his fortune stood at $782 billion going into Friday — nearly three times that of the second-richest person, Google co-founder Larry Page. "A trillion dollars in the hands of one man is incompatible not only with an affordable economy, but also with a healthy democracy," said Nabil Ahmed, senior director of economic justice at Oxfam America. Activists displayed a giant inflatable Musk outside Nasdaq's offices on Thursday to protest against the ability to create fake sexualised images using xAI's Grok chatbot.
SpaceX was co-founded by Musk in 2002 as a rocket startup. It's since grown into a major satellite operator and now includes Musk's artificial intelligence company, xAI — which owns the social media platform X (formerly Twitter). The IPO comes just over a year after Musk left President Donald Trump's administration, where he'd led the controversial "DOGE" effort to slash government spending, while still serving as CEO of both Tesla and SpaceX.
The offering was more than four times oversubscribed, according to Bloomberg, with strong demand from both institutional and retail investors — 20% of shares were reserved for retail buyers. The IPO is expected to mint thousands of new millionaires and several billionaires among former and current employees and long-time investors.
But the company's financials give some on Wall Street pause. SpaceX's valuation depends heavily on Musk delivering on promises that sound like science fiction: putting data centres in space, sending humans to Mars using unproven technology, massive expansion of the Starlink satellite internet service, and success for xAI's Grok chatbot, which has yet to gain traction against rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic.
SpaceX is growing fast — revenue hit $18.7 billion in 2025 — but it's also losing money, posting a net loss of $4.9 billion, mainly from spending to build AI capacity. "Our horizons are very long-term. I don't want to focus on quarterly earnings," SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell told CNBC. "What folks that invest in SpaceX, SpaceX AI, need to know is that what we're doing is very futuristic, and we should be thinking about the future as well as the current order."
In an extraordinary prediction, SpaceX's filing claims it can pull in more than $28.5 trillion in revenue from its various markets. SpaceX is the first among leading AI companies to go public; OpenAI and Anthropic have both recently filed initial documents with regulators.
"A trillion dollars in the hands of one man is incompatible not only with an affordable economy, but also with a healthy democracy." – Nabil Ahmed, Oxfam America