By Bailey Lipschultz | Updated on Jun 11, 2026 at 07:30 PM
SpaceX has made history with the biggest-ever IPO, launching it into the top ranks of the largest public companies and putting founder Elon Musk on the verge of becoming the world’s first trillionaire.
The company, known officially as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., sold 555.6 million shares at $135 each, according to a statement on its website Thursday. SpaceX’s IPO is more than double the size of Saudi Aramco’s $29.4 billion listing in 2019.
At that price, SpaceX has a market value of $1.77 trillion. Accounting for employee stock options and restricted share units, the pricing gives it a fully diluted valuation of about $1.8 trillion.
Musk’s fan base · in the retail trading community is a crucial component of the deal. They have placed more than $100 billion in orders for the stock, people familiar with the matter said · on Thursday, far more than the 20% of shares that had been reserved for them.
Not everyone is so excited. Veteran short-seller James Chanos on Wednesday called it “a hopes-and-dreams IPO” driven by enthusiasm for Musk and artificial intelligence rather than the fundamentals of a company that has yet to post a profit.
Still, coupled with rule changes that could fast track the stock into benchmark gauges like the Nasdaq-100 Index, demand from passive funds and retail investors unable to buy at the IPO price should set the stage for a solid cohort of buyers for shares of the rocket, satellite and AI company once they start trading.
“It’s probably the most hopeful IPO,” said Kim Forrest, chief investment officer at Bokeh Capital Partners, adding that she doesn’t buy IPOs. Buyers of SpaceX “want to be part of the future,” she said. “And I think that’s oddly hopeful in this time when we’re moving between the poles of greed and fear.”
SpaceX is the first of three major IPOs expected to capitalize on stock investors’ appetite for the leading AI companies, a seemingly insatiable demand that has propelled benchmark US indexes to records this year despite the acceleration in inflation and economic disruption caused by the war in Iran.
Anthropic PBC and OpenAI, two of the company’s AI competitors, are expected to go public as soon as this year and could seek valuations of more than $1 trillion each, so the performance of SpaceX’s stock will be as closely scrutinized by Silicon Valley venture capitalists as it is by Wall Street traders. The deluge of public equity, on top of an $85 billion equity offering from Alphabet Inc. and the potential for other big-tech firms to follow suit, is triggering a debate over whether there is enough investor demand to meet the incoming supply.
“It’s a big deal as a kind of precursor for Anthropic and OpenAI,” said Anthony Saglimbene, chief market strategist at Ameriprise. “When I look at all three of those and the amount of capital that these companies are raising, it tells me that the demand for AI is still very strong even though we’ve seen more volatility. And I think some of that volatility in the market has been positioning around the expectations for these IPOs.”
Read More: SpaceX IPO Will Mint Billions for a New Silicon Valley Hierarchy
Musk’s first-mover advantage allows SpaceX to notch another jump in its valuation in less than a year. SpaceX’s acquisition of Musk’s xAI in February vaulted the combined company’s private valuation to $1.25 trillion, and the original SpaceX value to $1 trillion. That was up from about $800 billion in an insider share sale in December — roughly double its mark from July 2025.
At the IPO price of $135, SpaceX’s market value ranks it among the top 10 public companies globally, and make it larger even than Musk’s own Tesla Inc.
The surge reflects the company’s evolution in six months from a focus on rocket launches and providing satellite broadband internet to an aspiring AI juggernaut, whose deals providing computing infrastructure to Anthropic and Alphabet’s Google for as much as $2.17 billion a month are set to become its biggest source of revenue.
Read More: SpaceX Inks $30 Billion Computing Power Deal With Google
Musk’s pitch placing SpaceX at the heart of a science-fiction vision of the future, with data centers in space and robot factories on the moon, came at precisely the right time to capitalize on the surging appetite for investments related to the AI boom. Even after a sharp sell-off in recent sessions, the Nasdaq-100 is still up 15.45% this year, while the Philadelphia Stock Exchange Semiconductor Index has surged 81.84% as a scramble for physical infrastructure drives up share prices across the sector.
Yet much of SpaceX’s plan to dominate what the company sees as a $26.5 trillion total addressable market in AI rests on technology that either doesn’t exist or hasn’t been tried at scale. The company also faces stiff competition from Anthropic and OpenAI, whose chatbots have been more widely adopted by consumers and enterprise customers than xAI’s Grok.
“The total addressable market for space is infinite,” Chanos, founder of Chanos & Co., said at the iConnections Global Alts conference in New York on Wednesday. “You can build whatever stories you want — colonies on Mars, factories on the moon, data centers in space — to justify the valuation.”
Still, even among observers who were skeptical of the company’s current valuation, many acknowledge Musk’s achievements building Tesla and SpaceX into giants — and making money for investors, thanks in part to his loyal retail investor fanbase.
A successful showing in public markets could make Musk a trillionaire, and his wealth could boom even further if he meets performance-based conditions for awards of as many as 1.3 billion additional class B shares in aggregate, split into tranches.
It would be no small feat to earn all those shares. The company’s market capitalization needs to reach $7.5 trillion, it will have to complete non-Earth-based data centers capable of delivering 100 terawatts of computing power per year, and establish a permanent human colony on Mars with at least 1 million inhabitants.
The CEO, who won’t be able to sell any shares until a year after the start of trading, is expected to control 84% of the voting power after the IPO. His control over SpaceX’s governance includes effectively being able to choose the board members, which means only he can remove himself as CEO.
The IPO is set to deliver returns to a wide range of backers, from venture capital firms to special purpose vehicle investors to even members of the Trump Administration.
Led by board member Antonio Gracias, Valor Equity Partners is the second largest shareholder after Musk, and is set to have 6.7% of the Class A shares after the listing, the filing shows. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell and Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen each hold millions of shares and stock options.
The listing is also set to cement paper gains for private funds and current and former employees. A group of more than 1,000 are negotiating as a group with wealth management firms for better pricing and access to sophisticated tax-saving financial products ahead of the IPO, Bloomberg News has reported.
Read More: SpaceX Staff Team Up for Lower Fees, Tax-Saving Tools Before IPO
Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley, Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are leading the deal, with 18 other banks participating. The company will debut on Nasdaq and Nasdaq Texas Friday under the symbol SPCX.
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