SpaceX officially became a public company on Friday, June 12. The stock was priced at $135 a share Thursday evening, then opened trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX at $150, a jump of about 11%.
By midday it had climbed as high as $176.52. It closed the day around $161, up roughly 19% from the IPO price, giving the company a market value of about $2.1 trillion.
This was the largest IPO in history by a wide margin. SpaceX sold 555 million shares and raised $75 billion, valuing the company at roughly $1.77 trillion at the IPO price alone, before the stock even started moving on its own.
Trading volume topped 500 million shares on the first day, close to the level Facebook saw when it went public in 2012.
Elon Musk and SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell rang the opening bell, with Musk doing so remotely from Texas while Shotwell stood at the Nasdaq in New York.
Musk has said SpaceX has been cash-flow positive since around 2015 and that the company is going public now to fund what he calls a major growth phase, including plans to put more than 100,000 satellites into orbit and to build AI data centers in space.
Why Was the Demand So High?
The IPO was oversubscribed by about four times, meaning demand for shares far outstripped what was available. Part of the reason is simple scarcity.
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Only around 4% of SpaceX’s shares were made available to the public, with the rest held by existing investors and employees. That small float made the limited supply of tradable shares even more valuable on day one.
SpaceX also worked to get itself added to major stock indexes, including the Nasdaq 100, much faster than usual. Normally, new listings wait for an annual reshuffle before joining an index. Under the new fast-entry rules, SpaceX could be added within about 15 trading days.
Once that happens, index funds that track the Nasdaq 100 will be required to buy SpaceX shares automatically, regardless of whether individual investors want to own the stock. That guaranteed future buying pressure is part of what fueled the rush to get in early.
S&P Dow Jones Indices said it would keep its existing eligibility rules in place for the S&P 500, so SpaceX won’t get the same fast-track treatment into that index, at least for now.
The Money Involved Is Simply Staggering
Musk became the world’s first trillionaire as a result of the debut, with his combined stakes in SpaceX and Tesla pushing his net worth past that mark. He is set to control about 85% of SpaceX’s voting shares.
Early investors did extremely well too. Founders Fund put $600 million into SpaceX years ago for a 3% stake that is now worth more than $50 billion. Andreessen Horowitz’s stake is valued at over $10 billion, and Sequoia’s at more than $20 billion.
Reports indicate around 4,400 current and former SpaceX employees will become millionaires from their equity, with about 400 becoming centimillionaires.
Tesla also has a stake, though a small one. The automaker owns nearly 19 million shares of SpaceX, less than 1% of the total outstanding. That stake came from converting Tesla’s earlier investment in xAI, Musk’s AI company, after SpaceX acquired xAI in February 2026.
Tesla shares themselves rose about 1.8% on Friday to $406.43, putting Tesla’s market cap at roughly $1.5 trillion.
A Company That Loses Billions But Promises Trillions
Despite the massive valuation, SpaceX is not profitable. The company lost $4.9 billion in 2025 on $18.6 billion in revenue and has accumulated total losses of $41.3 billion since it was founded in 2002.
Much of the current spending is going toward AI data centers tied to the xAI acquisition, which also brought SpaceX the Grok chatbot and the X platform, formerly Twitter. At its current spending pace, the $75 billion raised in the IPO could be used up within about two and a half years.
The bet on SpaceX’s future is enormous. In its filing with the SEC, the company estimated a total addressable market of $28.5 trillion, with $26.5 trillion of that coming from AI alone.
The filing also outlined plans for a permanent human colony on Mars, alongside the orbital data centers and satellite expansion Musk has talked about publicly.
SpaceX currently handles about 82% of all U.S. space launches and roughly half of the global commercial launch market, and Starlink, its satellite internet business, recently passed 10 million subscribers and remains the only consistently profitable part of the company.
Whatever happens next, Friday’s debut was a record-setting moment for Wall Street, for Musk personally, and for thousands of SpaceX employees who are now sitting on life-changing amounts of money on paper.
Whether the stock can hold onto its gains once the initial excitement fades is the question everyone will be watching in the days ahead.
