Elon Musk's SpaceX rang the opening bell at the Nasdaq on Friday as a public company, having just completed the largest initial public offering in history—a $75 billion blockbuster that valued the 23-year-old rocket company at just under $1.8 trillion, placing it ahead of Tesla, Meta, and Walmart among Wall Street's giants.
The company's ascent to the public markets matters because it signals a decisive moment in how the world funds the infrastructure of the future. SpaceX has grown from a scrappy startup into a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate that operates satellites, builds rockets, runs artificial intelligence ventures, and owns the social media platform X. That sprawling footprint reflects Musk's vision of an interconnected ecosystem reaching toward Mars—but it also carries real financial and technological risks that investors are betting will pay off.
The IPO priced more than 555 million shares at $135 each, with options for nearly 83 million additional shares potentially pushing the total above $86 billion. The offering was more than four times oversubscribed, a sign of robust investor appetite despite Musk's polarizing public profile. Demand among retail investors, for whom 20% of shares were reserved, also ran high. Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX's President and Chief Operating Officer, joined Musk's executives and employees at the Nasdaq MarketSite to mark the occasion. A neon sign in Times Square declared "Building the infrastructure of the future," while about 100 people gathered outside the New York exchange headquarters.
From Starbase in Texas, Musk offered his characteristic sweep of ambition. "SpaceX wants to be able to take you to the moon, take you to Mars, and ultimately beyond," he said. "I'm confident at this point that with the incredible team that we have here at SpaceX, that we will do that for you."
That vision is grounded in real revenue—$18.7 billion in 2025—but shadowed by substantial losses. SpaceX posted a net loss of $4.9 billion, primarily driven by spending on artificial intelligence capacity. The company's filing makes extraordinary claims about future potential, projecting more than $28.5 trillion in revenue from its various markets, anchored on promises to build data centers in space and land humans on Mars using technology not yet proven at scale.
The IPO is expected to create thousands of new millionaires and several billionaires from among SpaceX's current and former employees and investors. For Musk himself, a successful debut could make him history's first trillionaire, dwarfing other billionaires through sheer scale of wealth. Yet Wall Street observers note that the valuation depends heavily on Musk delivering results worthy of science fiction—not merely Starlink's expansion as a satellite internet service, but also the breakthrough success of xAI, his artificial intelligence company and rival to OpenAI and Anthropic, which has yet to gain significant traction.
SpaceX is the first major AI-adjacent company to go public after filing for an IPO. OpenAI and Anthropic have recently filed initial documents with regulators, suggesting a wave of artificial intelligence companies may soon follow to public markets. The conglomerate will trade under ticker symbol "SPCX," with all eyes now watching how Wall Street absorbs an offering that bets humanity's future on the audacious promises of one entrepreneur.