Late Wednesday, the order book for SpaceX’s initial public offering had swelled past $250 billion, roughly three times the shares on offer. The company priced the deal at $135 a share, the top of its marketed range, raising about $75 billion and clearing the way for trading Thursday on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX.
The response caught even veteran bankers by surprise. “I’ve done listings where we begged for orders in the last hour,” one banker involved in the deal said. “This one, people were begging us for an allocation.” Shares are being weighted toward long-term investors rather than hedge funds, according to people familiar with the matter, and the order book was the deepest on record for a technology listing.
The offering values SpaceX at about $1.75 trillion, by far the largest private company to test the public market. Its prospectus describes a business that spans commercial launch, satellite broadband and government contracts, with a backlog that includes the Pentagon, NASA and dozens of commercial operators. Revenue, which the company does not break out by segment, is dominated by Starlink, whose subscriber base has grown to millions and continues to expand into enterprise and maritime markets.
The capital raised is earmarked for the two most expensive projects on the company’s books: expanding the Starlink constellation to cover more of the planet, and completing Starship, the giant rocket designed to replace the Falcon fleet and, eventually, carry payloads to the Moon and Mars. Both programs consume cash at a rate that private investors were no longer willing to fund indefinitely.
One prominent voice rejects the math. Jim Chanos, the short seller known for an early call on Enron and a long-running campaign against Tesla, published a note hours before pricing calling the valuation “a mirage.” SpaceX trades at roughly 90 times sales, he said, against about 14 times for Tesla, a company with a far larger addressable market in transportation.
Chanos’s argument rests on three claims. Launch demand is lumpy and cyclical, Starlink’s network buildout requires years of heavy capital spending, and competitors such as Amazon’s Project Kuiper are finally reaching orbit with their own constellations. “The story is wonderful,” he wrote. “The multiple is the problem.”
Bulls counter that the bear case ignores the moat. SpaceX’s reusable rockets have made it the default carrier for most commercial satellites, and Starlink has signed up millions of subscribers, with waiting lists in several markets. Analysts at banks that underwrote the deal project revenue will roughly double over the next three years, driven by Starlink’s consumer and enterprise tiers, and they note that the launch business is effectively a monopoly in the West.
The ownership structure adds another layer to the debate. Musk controls SpaceX through a dual-class share structure, and the offering sells only a minority of the company, so the public float will be small relative to the valuation. Small floats tend to mean volatile trading, as buyers and sellers chase a thin supply of shares.
The debut also arrives with an unresolved legal thread. Devin Kim, a former senior engineer at xAI, filed a lawsuit in California the same day, alleging he was fired after repeatedly warning that Grok, the company’s chatbot, produced biased and inappropriate content and that his safety recommendations were ignored. The suit names both xAI and SpaceX as defendants, arguing the two companies operate as a single enterprise.
The timing was deliberate, according to a person close to Kim. “He wanted the complaint on the record the day the world was watching the company,” that person said. Neither company responded to requests for comment.
The lawsuit injects an AI-governance question into a listing dominated by financial math. The two companies share a founder and a growing web of commercial ties, and Kim’s lawyers are betting a court will treat them as one employer. Legal analysts said the case is early, but the allegations give critics a concrete document to cite as the stock begins trading.
For Musk, the listing locks in a valuation that rewards years of keeping SpaceX private, and it creates a liquid currency for employees and early backers who have waited more than a decade to cash out. For the broader market, the deal tests whether investors will pay growth-company multiples for a hardware business with heavy capital needs.
Trading opens at 9:30 a.m. Thursday. Bankers expect a pop, though they caution that the first hours will be volatile as index funds build positions and early buyers take profit. Short sellers such as Chanos are expected to probe the stock, and the wide gap between the order book and the available float suggests the first days could swing sharply in either direction.
Somewhere between the pricing call and the opening bell, $250 billion in orders will become roughly $75 billion in new shares, and the mirage question will meet the market.
