SpaceX IPO Closes at $75 Billion — Likely Making Elon Musk a Trillionaire
History was made on Wall Street Friday — and if you've ever thought about buying stock in a company that literally shoots rockets into space, well, you just missed the opening gun.
SpaceX, Elon Musk's rocket-and-AI mega-company, went public on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the ticker SPCX. The result? The biggest initial public offering (IPO — that's when a private company sells shares to the public for the first time) in history. The company raised $75 billion in a single day, blowing past the previous record set by Saudi Aramco's $29 billion debut back in 2019.
Here's what happened, step by step. SpaceX priced its shares at $135 each on Thursday, June 11. On Friday morning, trading opened around $150 — already above that price — and the stock rocketed (sorry, had to) as high as $176 before settling in to close the day at $160.95. That's a 19% gain on day one. By the closing bell, SpaceX was valued at over $2 trillion, making it one of the biggest companies in the world almost instantly.
And Elon Musk? He's now the world's first-ever trillionaire — with a T. His roughly 42% stake in SpaceX, combined with his Tesla holdings and other assets, pushes his estimated net worth to around $1.1 trillion. To put that in perspective, the second-richest person alive, former Google CEO Larry Page, is worth around $300 billion. Musk has more than three times that.
So why did SpaceX go public now? According to Musk, the company needs serious capital to fund its next phase — think 100,000+ satellites in orbit for its Starlink internet service, plus AI data centers launched into space. SpaceX is no longer just a rocket company; it merged with Musk's AI startup xAI earlier this year, making it a hybrid rocket-and-AI firm competing with the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic.
Demand for the stock was off the charts — Reuters reported more than $250 billion in orders flooded in, and retail investors (regular people like you and me) alone submitted over $70 billion in requests. SpaceX set aside at least 20% of shares for those individual investors, which is unusually generous for a deal this size. Some folks made a few bucks; at least one retail investor walked away with $24 in profit and called it a win.
But here's the part worth keeping in your back pocket: the valuation is aggressive. Analysts at Morningstar estimate SpaceX is worth roughly $780 billion — less than half of what the market is currently paying. The IPO was priced at about 94 times the company's revenue, compared to Meta at 22x and Amazon at 18x when they went public. And SpaceX actually lost $4.9 billion last year. This is very much a bet on future growth, not current profits.
For the average person, this matters in a few ways. If you have a 401(k) or index funds, SpaceX may quietly become part of your portfolio as it gets folded into major indexes. If you're a Starlink subscriber, the company now has a massive war chest to expand its satellite network. And if you're just watching the wealth gap: the gap between Musk and everyone else just got a whole lot wider.
Claude’s Scrutiny
Calling Musk a 'trillionaire' is really a paper net worth figure based on a stock that's been trading for one day — it's not cash in hand, and a single bad quarter could knock hundreds of billions off that number fast.
Key Takeaways
- SpaceX raised $75 billion in the largest IPO in history, selling shares at $135 each — and the stock jumped 19% on its very first day of trading.
- Elon Musk is now officially the world's first 'trillionaire' on paper, with an estimated net worth of $1.1 trillion — though that's tied up in stock, not cash.
- The valuation is a big bet on the future: SpaceX lost nearly $5 billion last year and is priced at 94x revenue, far above typical tech IPO benchmarks.
- Regular retail investors got an unusually large slice of the deal (at least 20% of shares), so everyday people could own a piece — but the risk is real.
- This is likely the first of several major AI-era IPOs; OpenAI and Anthropic are expected to follow SpaceX into the public markets.
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Perspectives
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Balanced tone, noted analyst concern that buying SpaceX stock is partly a personal bet on Musk himself — the most measured of the major outlets covering the story.
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Led with celebratory framing around Musk's trillionaire status with minimal attention to the valuation risks or the company's operating losses.
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Stood out by actually including Morningstar's skeptical valuation analysis — the only outlet to note SpaceX's 94x revenue multiple and question the addressable market math.
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Uniquely humanized the story by focusing on everyday retail investors and what the IPO meant for ordinary people — not just billionaires.
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Most willing to flag financial red flags directly, including the $8.7 billion in losses over 15 months and the skeptical analyst estimate that SpaceX is worth less than half its IPO price.
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Emphasized regulatory and public-market scrutiny as a new challenge for SpaceX, noting analysts' uncertainty about whether the valuation will hold up over time.
My Notes
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