SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket and artificial intelligence company, capped the largest-ever initial public offering by surging 11 percent when it began trading on Friday, making the world’s richest man the first trillionaire and setting the stage for fast-growing AI companies to hit the stock market in a once-in-a-lifetime bonanza.
SpaceX shares opened trading at $150, up from their IPO price of $135 a share. stock. That valued the company at nearly $2 trillion, surpassing the market values of other titans of American industry, including Walmart and General Motors combined.
At that size, the offering dwarfed Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company, which was valued at $1.7 trillion and raised more than $29 billion when it went public in 2019. SpaceX raised $75 billion from its offering, more than the total raised by every other USIPO over the past two years, according to research and advisory Capital firm Remmna.
The pop in SpaceX’s stock price also catapulted Mr. Musk, 54, to trillionaire status. The entrepreneur, who not only runs SpaceX, but also runs the electric car manufacturer Tesla and other companies, has long been the richest person on the planet. But passing the trillionaire milestone is significant, further increasing Mr. Musk’s wealth and influence.
Musk’s friends and venture capital and private equity firms were enriched by the IPO, many by billions of dollars. Thousands of SpaceX employees became instant millionaires.
Mr. Musk spent Friday at the company’s headquarters in Starbase, Texas, celebrating with employees, family, friends and investors. “It’s certainly hard to believe that a small company that started in a warehouse in El Segundo is now going public,” he told them, referring to SpaceX’s 2002 founding in Southern California. “I gave SpaceX less than a 10 percent chance of even succeeding.”
A SpaceX spokesman and Mr. Musk did not return requests for comment.
SpaceX’s blockbuster IPO paves the way for mega-offerings from AI start-ups OpenAI and Anthropic, each valued at nearly $1 trillion. Never have three trillion-dollar entities gone public in the same year. Their stock market debuts could signal that a new era of corporate power has arrived, with SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic joining the pantheon of tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, Apple, Netflix and Meta.
For SpaceX, the first day of trading was a long road. Mr. Musk founded the company 24 years ago with the idea of turning humans into a multiplanetary species. For years, his dreams of private space flight seemed out of reach.
But Mr. Musk has remade the space race with partially reusable rockets and transformed communications with the company’s satellite internet service, Starlink. In February, SpaceX bought his AI company, xAI, which owned the social media platform X, creating a conglomerate of the tech billionaire’s diverse interests.
Mr. Musk has used SpaceX as something of a piggy bank over the past two decades, securing loans from the company for himself and relying on the company to support several troubled companies in his orbit. It was enabled in part because of Mr. Musk’s iron grip on SpaceX; he controlled about 85 percent of shareholder votes before the IPO because of a class of voting shares and other corporate structures.
In its IPO, SpaceX sold more than 555 million shares, representing a little more than 4 percent of the company’s outstanding shares. The company and its bankers courted traditional institutional investors and encouraged wealthy individuals and retail investors to buy. SpaceX also wanted several indexes to change their rules so that its shares would be included sooner than usual, which would ultimately force managers of major index funds to buy the stock.
SpaceX’s stock price is expected to fluctuate higher and lower in the weeks following the IPO, not necessarily due to changing opinions about the company, but due to certain technicalities. SpaceX is expected to face high demand for its relatively low number of shares available, potentially leading to sharp price increases. That could change as investor enthusiasm wanes and more stocks become available for trading.
JPMorgan analysts said this week that the latest average IPO price gain stood at 32 percent after the first day of trading, but fell to a 26 percent loss after 12 months.
Daniel Hanson, a portfolio manager at investment firm Neuberger Berman, who oversees a fund with a $200 million investment in SpaceX, said the speed with which SpaceX went public – six months from when Mr Musk first announced his intentions – was an example of the “perseverance” of its management team.
“It is exciting to see the team recognized by the public for what they have achieved since their founding 24 years ago,” he said.
In recent weeks, SpaceX, which has contracts with NASA and other federal agencies, has also faced questions about its business, including its expenses and how it can justify its valuation. In its IPO prospectus, the company reported that it had lost more than $4.9 billion last year, compared with a profit of $791 million in 2024 due to increased spending on AI. Revenue was $18.7 billion last year, up 33 percent from the previous year.
By contrast, Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is valued at slightly less than SpaceX at just over $1.4 trillion, although it pulls in far more and generates big profits. Last year, Meta’s revenue was $201 billion and its profit was $60.5 billion.
SpaceX has said it plans to use the money it raises from its IPO to pay off loans and finance various moonshots, including Mr. Musk’s goals to put AI data centers in orbit, build a lunar factory and eventually send humans to Mars.
While skeptics have questioned the feasibility of these plans, there are plenty of Mr. Musk’s fans. In New York, an excited crowd of several dozen people gathered outside the Nasdaq building in Times Square on Friday morning, including Zach Boucher, 45, who flew in from California overnight to see SpaceX listed on the Nasdaq.
Mr. Boucher said he bought more than 2,200 SpaceX shares through Wells Fargo and “will never sell, I’m holding for the long term.”
This moment is “like getting in on the ground floor of GE or GM, or being here when Microsoft opened,” he said.
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and 18 other banks served as underwriters for SpaceX’s IPO
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems. The two companies have denied the allegations.)
Joe Rennison and Lauren McCarthy contributed reporting from New York.
