SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket and artificial intelligence company, capped the largest initial public offering in history by surging 11 percent when it began trading on Friday, making the world’s richest man its first billionaire and setting the stage for fast-growing artificial intelligence companies to hit the stock market in a once-in-a-lifetime bonanza.
SpaceX shares opened trading at $150, down from its IPO price of $135 per share. That valued the company at nearly $2 trillion, surpassing the market capitalizations of other titans of American industry, including Walmart and General Motors combined.
At that size, the offering dethroned Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state 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 combined amount amassed by all other USIPOs in the past two years, according to Renaissance Capital, a research and advisory firm.
The rise in SpaceX’s stock price also catapulted Musk, 54, to billionaire status. The businessman, who not only runs SpaceX but also runs electric car maker Tesla and other companies, has long been the richest person on the planet. But surpassing the milestone of being a billionaire is significant, as it further increases Musk’s fortune and influence.
A circle of Musk’s friends and private investment and venture capital firms became richer from the IPO, many of them by billions of dollars. Thousands of SpaceX employees became instant millionaires.
Musk spent Friday at the company’s headquarters in Starbase, Texas, where he celebrated 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 the founding of SpaceX in 2002 in Southern California. “I gave SpaceX less than a 10 percent chance of succeeding.”
A spokesperson for SpaceX and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
SpaceX’s blockbuster IPO paves the way for mega deals from AI startups OpenAI and Anthropic, each valued at nearly $1 trillion. Never have three trillion-dollar entities gone public in the same year. Its stock market debut could signal that a new era of corporate power has arrived, with SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic joining the pantheon of tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, Apple, Netflix and Meta.
For SpaceX, the first day of operations culminated a long journey. Musk founded the company 24 years ago with the idea of making humans a multiplanetary species. For years, his dreams of private spaceflight seemed out of reach.
But Musk has remade the space race with partially reusable rockets and transformed communication with the company’s satellite Internet service, Starlink. In February, SpaceX bought his artificial intelligence company, xAI, which owns the social media platform X, creating a conglomerate of the tech billionaire’s various interests.
Musk has used SpaceX as a kind of piggy bank for the past two decades, taking out loans from the company for himself and relying on the company to shore up several troubled businesses in his orbit. This was possible in part thanks to Musk’s tight control over SpaceX; controlled about 85 percent of shareholder votes before the IPO due to a supervoting share class 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 faster than normal, eventually forcing managers of large index funds to buy the shares.
SpaceX’s stock price is expected to rise and fall in the weeks following its IPO, not necessarily due to changing opinions about the company, but rather due to certain technical details. SpaceX is expected to face high demand for its relatively low number of available shares, which could lead to sharp price increases. That could change as investor enthusiasm wanes and more shares become available to trade.
JPMorgan analysts said this week that the recent average IPO share price gain was 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 at which SpaceX went public — six months after Musk first announced his intentions — was an example of the “tenacity” of his executive team.
“It’s exciting to see the team recognized by the public for what they have accomplished since their founding 24 years ago,” he said.
In recent weeks, SpaceX, which contracts with NASA and other federal agencies, has also faced questions about its business, including its spending and how it can justify its valuation. In its initial public offering 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.
On the contrary, Meta, owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is valued at slightly less than SpaceX, at just over $1.4 trillion, although it generates much more revenue and great profits. Last year, Meta’s revenue was $201 billion and profits were $60.5 billion.
SpaceX has said it plans to use the money it raises from its IPO to repay loans and finance several trips to the moon, including Musk’s goals of putting artificial intelligence data centers into orbit, building a lunar factory and eventually sending humans to Mars.
While skeptics have questioned whether these plans are feasible, Musk fans abound. In New York, an excited crowd of several dozen people gathered in front of the Nasdaq building in Times Square on Friday morning, including Zach Boucher, 45, who flew from California overnight to see SpaceX list on the Nasdaq.
Boucher said he was buying more than 2,200 SpaceX shares through Wells Fargo and would “never sell them, I’ll hold them for the long term.”
This moment is “like walking 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 acted as underwriters for the SpaceX IPO.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement of news content related to artificial intelligence systems. The two companies have denied the claims.)
Joe Renison and Laura McCarthy contributed reporting from New York.
