Gwynne Shotwell rang the opening bell at the Nasdaq MarketSite in Times Square, and a stock that investors had chased for years finally traded under a ticker. SPCX opened at $174, 29% above the $135 offer price, valuing SpaceX at roughly $2.28 trillion.
The June 12 debut was the largest initial public offering on record. SpaceX sold 555.6 million Class A shares and raised about $75 billion, more than double the roughly $29 billion Saudi Aramco collected in its 2019 listing, which had held the record. Subscription orders exceeded $250 billion, according to people familiar with the offering, roughly ten times the amount SpaceX sought. Institutional demand was so strong that the retail allocation was cut to the low 20% range.
The first day was a trading event by any measure. More than 360 million shares changed hands across venues, with about 172 million on Nasdaq alone, breaking the record for the exchange’s most active stock set by Nokia years ago. Volume ran more than ten times that of Cerebras, the year’s second-largest IPO, on its debut. The stock climbed as high as $176.52 during the session and gave back some ground as trading wore on.
The company behind the listing is no longer simply a rocket maker. SpaceX flew 165 Falcon launches in 2025, more than every other launch provider on the planet combined, and it absorbed Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, in an all-stock merger in February that valued the combination at $1.25 trillion. The S-1 prospectus, filed May 20, revealed an entity that spans launch services, satellite broadband and data centers. Anthropic has agreed to pay SpaceX $1.25 billion a month for compute capacity at the Colossus data centers in Memphis through May 2029, a contract worth roughly $45 billion, according to the filing. Revenue reached about $18.7 billion in 2025, with a net loss of $4.9 billion after the xAI absorption and the ramp of Starship and AI infrastructure spending.
The listing made Musk, who holds about 42% of the equity and 82% to 85% of the voting power through a dual-class structure, the first person whose paper net worth crossed $1 trillion, according to the New York Times.
Wall Street’s take was generous. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley led the offering, joined by JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup. The banks collected roughly $500 million in fees, with the two leads taking about $100 million each. Only about 5% of SpaceX’s shares are in public hands, a free float so thin that Nasdaq changed its index rules to let the company join the Nasdaq-100 fifteen trading days after the IPO, with a float-adjusted weight of about 1%.
The valuation, at roughly 94 times 2025 revenue, has divided investors since the roadshow began on June 3. The bull case rests on Starship, which is designed to be fully reusable and could cut the cost of putting mass into orbit by an order of magnitude, and on the AI compute business, where demand for power and data centers shows no sign of slowing. The bear case rests on the same numbers: a company that lost money last year, whose largest customer contract depends on a startup’s ability to keep paying $1.25 billion a month, and whose public float is so small that index funds will struggle to own it at scale.
The broader market read the debut as a verdict on the AI infrastructure boom. A company whose revenue is roughly two-thirds launch and one-third the beginning of an AI compute business was valued at more than most of the companies that claim the AI label, a sign that investors are paying for capacity itself, power, rockets, data centers, whatever can be built, rather than for any single product. The comparison to Cerebras, whose IPO was the year’s largest until this one, shows the appetite: investors who bought AI hardware exposure at any price were rewarded with more of it.
The roadshow that preceded the listing was, by most accounts, a formality. Underwriters led by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley fielded orders that dwarfed the offering within days of the June 3 pricing announcement, and the company raised the size of the retail pool only to watch institutions take most of it. A greenshoe of 83.3 million additional shares, 15% of the issue, was set aside to support the stock in its first weeks. Cathie Wood’s ARK funds disclosed purchases of about 3.29 million SPCX shares across four ETFs, roughly $444 million at purchase prices, on the first day of trading. The offering also carried a governance structure that keeps control firmly with Musk: the dual-class arrangement leaves the company’s founder with more than four-fifths of the voting power even after the sale, which analysts said would be a recurring question for index funds and governance-minded shareholders.
The first day answered the question of demand. SPCX ended its debut as the sixth most valuable company listed in the United States, sitting among the largest technology firms in the world. The questions that matter now are different: whether the launch business can keep compounding, whether the AI contracts hold, and whether a stock that priced in a decade of execution can tolerate a quarter of disappointment. For one day, none of that mattered. The bell rang, the tape ran, and the largest IPO in history was done.
