SpaceX Soars in Record-Breaking IPO, Making Musk the World's First Trillionaire

SpaceX made history on Friday with the largest initial public offering ever recorded, pricing shares at $135 and watching them rocket more than 19% on their first day of trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX. Shares opened at $150, surged past $160 shortly after the bell, and closed around $161.11, valuing Elon Musk's space and AI infrastructure company at approximately $1.77 trillion. The offering raised roughly $75 billion, instantly making Musk, who retains more than 82% of voting control, the world's first trillionaire on paper.

The debut capped a dramatic week for SpaceX and for markets more broadly. Starlink remains the company's primary revenue driver and its only consistently profitable division, but investors are clearly pricing in much more than satellite internet. SpaceX has been positioning itself at the intersection of space technology, satellite connectivity, and AI compute through its integration with xAI, with executives describing ambitions to eventually place AI data centers in orbit. Wall Street analysts at Bank of America noted that monthly US IPO proceeds had already hit a post-pandemic high of roughly $15 billion before SpaceX even priced, and predicted the success of this listing could unleash a wave of additional mega-IPOs.

Not every voice on Wall Street was uniformly bullish. Some prominent short-sellers have publicly questioned whether the trillion-dollar-plus valuation is justified by SpaceX's current cash flows, with one well-known investor describing the price tag as built more on expectations than on fundamentals. Others, however, argued the opposite — framing the valuation as conservative relative to the long-term opportunity in space-based infrastructure and AI compute, with some estimates of the addressable market running into the trillions of dollars over the coming decade.

The IPO's success rippled across the broader market on Friday, with the S&P 500, Nasdaq, and Dow all finishing higher as investor sentiment improved. The listing also arrived amid growing optimism that a US-Iran peace deal could soon be finalized, adding a second tailwind to Friday's gains. With SpaceX now trading as a public company, attention turns to whether other high-profile private companies in aerospace and AI — long rumored to be eyeing public listings — will follow suit in the second half of 2026, a prospect that bankers say could reshape the Nasdaq's largest-IPO leaderboard entirely.