Elon Musk has become the world’s first trillionaire after his company SpaceX had the largest initial public offering in history.
The company raised $75 billion in its public listing, pricing 555.6 million shares at $135 each, it said on Thursday. SpaceX’s IPO is more than double the size of Saudi Aramco’s $29.4 billion listing in 2019.
"It is hard to believe that a little company that started in a warehouse in El Segundo is going public in the largest IPO ever," Mr Musk told employees before the listing.
"I gave SpaceX less than a 10 per cent chance of succeeding at all."
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Jubilant scenes during SpaceX's initial public offering at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, US. Bloomberg -
Elon Musk, founder and chief executive of SpaceX, speaks via video link before the ringing of opening bell at the Nasdaq stock exchange. AFP -
A SpaceX sign in New York. Bloomberg -
Maye Musk, mother of Elon Musk, during the company's IPO. Bloomberg -
People take photos of a SpaceX advert in New York City. Reuters -
Gwynne Shotwell, president of SpaceX, is joined by company executives as they ring the opening bell at the Nasdaq. AFP
Space Exploration Technologies, as it is officially known, gave the underwriting banks an overallotment option to buy an additional 83.3 million shares at the IPO price, the statement showed. The listing drew demand for more than four times the available shares.
Mr Musk says the company is going public because it needs cash to fund its ambitions of putting satellites and data centres in space, with the goal of eventually founding a colony on Mars.
"We want to be able to take anyone who wants to go to the Moon, to Mars, or anywhere in the solar system — or maybe beyond the solar system at some point — we want to be able to take you there," Mr Musk said.
"Not just a few astronauts, I mean you, literally you - whoever you are watching this, SpaceX wants to take you to the Moon, to Mars, and ultimately beyond."
Mr Musk’s supporters in the retail trading community were a crucial component of the deal, placing more than $100 billion in orders for the stock, Bloomberg reported on Thursday.
SpaceX is the first of three major IPOs expected to capitalise on stock investors’ appetite for the leading AI companies. There is a seemingly insatiable demand that has propelled benchmark US indexes to record levels this year, despite a surge in inflation and the economic disruption caused by the war in Iran.
Anthropic and OpenAI, two of the company’s AI competitors, are expected to go public this year and could seek valuations of more than $1 trillion each. That means the performance of SpaceX’s stock will be as closely scrutinised by Silicon Valley venture capitalists as it is by Wall Street traders.
The deluge of public equity, on top of an $85 billion equity offering from Alphabet and the potential for other big tech companies to follow suit, has sparked a debate over whether there is enough investor demand to meet the incoming supply.
SpaceX’s acquisition of Mr Musk’s xAI in February vaulted the combined company’s private valuation to $1.25 trillion, with the original SpaceX value hitting $1 trillion. That was up from about $800 billion in an insider share sale in December – about double its mark from July 2025.
At the IPO price of $135, SpaceX’s market value ranks it among the top 10 public companies globally and makes it larger even than another of Mr Musk’s companies, Tesla.
The surge reflects the evolution of SpaceX over the past six months, from focusing on rocket launches and providing satellite broadband internet to becoming an aspiring AI juggernaut. Deals to provide computing infrastructure to Anthropic and Alphabet’s Google for as much as $2.17 billion a month are set to become SpaceX's biggest source of revenue.
Mr Musk’s pitch to place SpaceX at the heart of a sci-fi vision of the future, with data centres in space and robot factories on the Moon, came at precisely the right time to capitalise on the surging appetite for investments related to the AI boom.
Yet much of SpaceX’s plans to dominate what the company sees as a $26.5 trillion total addressable market in AI rests on technology that either does not exist or has not yet been tested at scale. The company also faces stiff competition from Anthropic and OpenAI, whose chatbots have been more widely adopted by consumers and enterprise customers than xAI’s Grok.
But even observers sceptical of the company’s current valuation have acknowledged Mr Musk’s achievements in building Tesla and SpaceX into giants – and making money for investors, thanks in part to his loyal retail investor fanbase.
Musk’s paper gains
Mr Musk’s net worth surged past $1.1 trillion with the IPO, making him the world's first trillionaire.
His wealth will increase even further if he meets performance-based conditions for awards of as many as 1.3 billion additional class B shares in aggregate, split into tranches.
It would be no small feat to earn all those shares. The company’s market capitalisation needs to reach $7.5 trillion, it will have to complete non-Earth-based data centres capable of delivering 100 terawatts of computing power a year, and establish a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants.
Mr Musk, who will not be able to sell any shares until a year after the start of trading, controls 84 per cent of the voting power after the IPO, excluding the potential overallotment. SpaceX’s governance policies ensure Mr Musk is effectively able to choose the board members, which means only he can remove himself as chief executive.
The IPO is set to deliver returns to a variety of backers, from venture capital firms to special purpose vehicle investors to members of US President Donald Trump's administration.
-With Bloomberg
