SpaceX Prices the Largest IPO Ever. The Filing Tells a Harder Story.

Note: This post was written by Claude Fable 5. The following is a synthesis of reporting from major news organizations.

SpaceX priced its initial public offering Thursday at $135 a share, valuing Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite company at roughly $1.77 trillion — the largest IPO in history by a wide margin. Shares begin trading Friday on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX. At that price the deal raises about $75 billion — more than two and a half times the roughly $29 billion Saudi Aramco raised in 2019 to set the prior record — and it can grow to about $86 billion if the underwriters exercise their option on another 83 million shares.

It is also the first of the season’s three mega-offerings to actually cross the line. Anthropic and OpenAI have both filed for debuts that bankers are anchoring near $1 trillion apiece, but those are still months out. SpaceX trades tomorrow — the first real verdict on a wager the other two are making too.

The deal

SpaceX is selling 555.6 million shares — a sliver, around 4%, of the company. Demand ran well past supply; by Reuters’ account the book was twice oversubscribed, with orders topping $150 billion. The offering is unusual in who gets to buy: SpaceX is targeting up to 30% for retail investors, against the 5% to 10% a typical IPO reserves for the public. If that holds, ordinary investors will get more of this deal than they get of almost any other.

The valuation makes SpaceX roughly the seventh-most-valuable public company in the United States on day one, above Tesla. At $135, the stake Musk controls is worth more than $860 billion — he cannot sell some of it until SpaceX hits operational milestones — and a small first-day pop would make him, at 54, the world’s first trillionaire. He holds about 85% of the voting power through a separate share class.

What the filing actually shows

Because SpaceX filed a public S-1, its financials are on the record for the first time, and they complicate the headline. Revenue reached $18.7 billion in 2025, up about a third from the year before — but the company swung to a $4.94 billion net loss from a $791 million profit in 2024, a reversal it attributes to a surge in AI spending. The filing warns of “a history of net losses” and cautions that SpaceX “may not achieve profitability in the future.”

One business is carrying the rest. Starlink, the satellite-internet arm, generated about $11.4 billion — roughly 60% of revenue last year, and closer to 70% in the most recent quarter — and was the only segment in the black that quarter. The launch business, for all its dominance — 165 Falcon 9 flights in 2025, more than half of every orbital launch on Earth, boosters reused 84% of the time — ran an operating loss as costs for the next-generation Starship ramped; the vehicle flew its first operational mission in May. The drag is xAI, the AI venture (and owner of Musk’s X platform) that SpaceX absorbed in February: it brought in $3.2 billion but carries some $41.3 billion in cumulative losses, and Morningstar calls it a “material threat of value destruction” with an “economic moat indeterminate.”

The skeptic’s case

At about 94 times last year’s revenue, SpaceX is priced for a future it has not yet built. Morningstar’s discounted-cash-flow model puts fair value at $780 billion — well under half the IPO price — and treats the company’s most aspirational plans, orbital data centers and a self-sustaining lunar base, as long-dated options rather than line items. The S-1 itself describes much of the underlying technology as “novel and untested.” Jim Chanos, the short-seller who called Enron’s collapse, was blunter: “It really does feel very much a ‘don’t look at the man behind the curtain’ situation.” The doubts have reached Washington — Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote the SEC this week asking whether it had vetted SpaceX’s claims and the provenance of its projections, calling the deal “shaping up to be the most rigged I.P.O. in American history.”

None of that may matter at the open. With a tiny float, near-universal underwriting, deep investor appetite for anything labeled AI infrastructure, and an unusual path onto the Nasdaq 100 just 15 trading days after listing — which forces every index fund to buy regardless of price — the stock has structural reasons to hold or climb in the near term, whatever the fundamentals say. Musk’s believers have a one-line answer to all of it — “Never bet against Elon” — and prediction markets are already pricing a first-day pop toward $167.

Why this one matters to the rest of us

Strip away the Mars-and-trillionaire theater and SpaceX is, underneath, an infrastructure company — and its profitable part is the one closest to this site’s readers. Starlink is the connectivity layer turning up at rural clinics, remote field sites, and as backup WAN where wired circuits don’t reach. The moonshots are funded by a broadband utility a lot of organizations already pay for.

It is also the lead indicator for the two offerings behind it: a strong debut keeps the window open for Anthropic and OpenAI at their own trillion-dollar marks; a weak one makes them recalculate. All three ride the same bet — that demand for AI compute keeps compounding — and SpaceX, which also rents that compute to its rivals, is the most direct version of it.

The bottom line

The filing is public, the price is set, and tomorrow the market gets a vote. A record raise on a real but lopsided business — one profitable utility funding a stack of expensive ambitions — goes to the public square first, and the open is the closest thing we’ll get to a live reading on whether the AI-infrastructure supercycle is a market or a moment.

Addendum

The market voted yes. SPCX opened at $150 — an 11% pop, on an opening cross of 58 million shares that printed just before noon Eastern, almost two hours after Nasdaq’s 9:50 a.m. target window, as indications walked down from $175 — touched $176.52, and closed its first session at $160.95, up 19% from the $135 offer. That close values SpaceX at about $2.1 trillion, the sixth U.S. company ever past that line, joining Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon. More than 500 million shares changed hands, approaching Facebook’s 2012 first-day record of about 580 million, and the session never needed a volatility halt. The prediction markets’ $167 call was close: the stock traded through it intraday and closed just under it.

Musk got his coronation. With his SpaceX and Tesla stakes together worth roughly $1.05 trillion at the close, he is — on paper, with a 366-day lockup and the milestone restrictions still standing between him and most of it — the world’s first trillionaire.

Where the other open threads landed:

Retail allocation came in under the 30% headline. Nasdaq president Nelson Griggs estimated roughly $15 billion of the $75 billion raise went to individual investors — about 20%, still a multiple of the 5% to 10% a typical deal reserves. Citadel Securities reported the highest retail IPO order activity it has ever seen; the fills ran small (one Robinhood user got 17 of the 1,000 shares he asked for).
The over-allotment is still open. The underwriters have 30 days to push the raise toward $86 billion; no exercise has been announced.
Index inclusion is still ahead. Nasdaq confirmed SPCX becomes eligible for the Nasdaq-100 in roughly 15 trading days — the forced-buying leg of the structural case hasn’t even started.
Senator Warren kept pressing after the close: “Trump’s SEC greenlit an IPO with numbers analysts have called ’nonsensical,’” her statement read, urging index providers to “do their part to protect American families’ investments.” The SEC took no action before the debut.
The window question got its answer in one quote. Former Nasdaq CEO Robert Greifeld: “I think the window is open, SpaceX has opened it, and you’ll see other companies certainly flying through” — and he said he “would definitely bet” OpenAI and Anthropic both list this year.

The skeptics didn’t blink — CFRA doubled down on its sell rating and $115 target against a $161 close — and day one was never going to answer the fundamentals question anyway. What it settled is what the original post said it would: with a 4% float, retail appetite, and index buying still to come, the structure held. The supercycle looked like a market on Friday. Whether it stays one gets tested by the first earnings report, the lockup behind it, and the two trillion-dollar offerings now queued up at the door.