SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket and artificial intelligence company, rose 11% in early trading Friday, strengthening the power of the world’s richest man and paving the way for fast-growing AI companies to hit the stock market in a once-in-a-lifetime bonanza.
SpaceX shares debuted at $150, up from their IPO price of $135 per share. That values the company at nearly $2 trillion, surpassing the market capitalizations of other titans of American industry, including Walmart and General Motors combined.
It is the largest IPO ever, dethroning Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company, which was valued at $1.7 trillion and raised more than $29 billion in its 2019 IPO. SpaceX raised $75 billion through its offering, more than the combined amount raised by all other IPOs in the past two years, according to Renaissance Capital, a research and investment firm. advice.
The increase in SpaceX’s share price also propelled Mr. Musk, 54, to become the world’s first billionaire. The entrepreneur, who runs not only SpaceX but also electric car maker Tesla and other companies, has long been the richest person on the planet. But reaching the trillionaire milestone is significant, as it further increases Mr. Musk’s fortune and influence.
The offering also enriched a coterie of Mr. Musk’s friends and private venture capital and investment firms. Thousands of SpaceX employees also became instant millionaires.
Mr. 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 publicly traded,” he told them, referring to SpaceX’s 2002 founding in Southern California.
A SpaceX spokesperson and Mr. 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 entities worth billions of dollars gone public in the same year. Their stock market debut could signal the arrival of a new era of corporate power, 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 ended a long road. Mr. Musk founded the company 24 years ago with the idea of making humans a multi-planetary species. For years, his dreams of private spaceflight seemed out of reach.
But Mr. Musk has resurfaced the space race with partly reusable rockets and transformed communications with the company’s satellite Internet service, Starlink. In February, SpaceX bought his AI company, xAI, which owned 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 and relying on the company to consolidate several struggling businesses in its orbit. This was made possible in part by Mr. Musk’s iron grip on SpaceX; it controlled about 85 percent of shareholder votes before the IPO due to a superfluous voting share class and other corporate structures.
During its IPO, SpaceX sold more than 555 million shares, representing just over 4% of the company’s outstanding shares. The company and its bankers courted traditional institutional investors and encouraged high-net-worth individuals and retail investors to buy. SpaceX also wanted several indexes to change their rules so that its shares would be included more quickly than usual, which would eventually force managers of large index funds to buy back the shares.
SpaceX’s stock price is expected to fluctuate more and more in the weeks following its listing, not necessarily due to changes in opinion about the company, but due to certain technical details. SpaceX is expected to face strong demand for its relatively small number of available shares, which could lead to sharp price increases. That could change as investor enthusiasm wanes and more shares become available for trading.
JPMorgan analysts said this week that the recent average IPO stock price increase stood at 32 percent after the first day of trading, but fell to a loss of 26 percent after 12 months.
In recent weeks, SpaceX, which has 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 IPO prospectus, the company said it lost more than $4.9 billion last year, compared to a profit of $791 million in 2024 due to increased spending on AI. Revenue was $18.7 billion last year, up 33% from the previous year.
In contrast, Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is valued at slightly less than SpaceX, at just over $1.4 trillion, even though it generates far more revenue and generates significant profits. Last year, Meta’s revenue was $201 billion and its profit was $60.5 billion.
SpaceX said it planned to use the money raised from its IPO to repay loans and fund various lunar projects, including Mr. Musk’s goals of putting AI data centers into orbit, building a lunar factory and, eventually, sending humans to Mars.
Although skeptics question whether these plans are feasible, there is no shortage of Mr. Musk’s fans. In New York, an enthusiastic crowd of several dozen people gathered Friday morning in front of the Nasdaq building in Times Square, including Zach Boucher, 45, who came from California overnight to see SpaceX listed on Nasdaq.
Mr. 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 getting in on the ground floor of GE or GM, or being here at the Microsoft opening,” 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 sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement over news content related to AI systems. Both companies have denied the allegations.)
Joe Rennison And Lauren McCarthy contributed reporting from New York.
