SpaceX prices record IPO at nearly $1.8 trillion valuation

SpaceX was scheduled to start trading on the Nasdaq on Friday after pricing what AFP reported would be the largest initial public offering on record. The debut gives Elon Musk’s space and technology group a valuation of just under $1.8 trillion, according to a filing with the U.S. markets regulator.

The company priced more than 555 million shares at $135 each in the filing, AFP reported. That would raise more than $75 billion, surpassing Saudi Aramco’s $29.4 billion listing in 2019, and options for nearly 83 million more shares could lift the total above $86 billion.

At that valuation, SpaceX would rank among the 10 largest companies on Wall Street, ahead of Tesla, Meta and Walmart, according to AFP. The company plans to trade under the ticker symbol SPCX, and executives were due to mark the listing by ringing the Nasdaq opening bell in Times Square.

Musk co-founded SpaceX in 2002 as a rocket company. AFP reported that it has since grown into a major satellite operator and has absorbed xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, which includes X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

Investor demand was strong before the listing, according to Bloomberg reporting cited by AFP. Bloomberg reported that the offering was more than four times oversubscribed, while AFP said demand from retail investors was also high after 20% of the shares were reserved for them.

SpaceX is the first of several major AI-linked companies moving toward the public markets, AFP reported. OpenAI and Anthropic have both recently filed initial paperwork with regulators, according to AFP.

The listing could sharply increase Musk’s wealth. Forbes put his fortune at $782 billion before the IPO, nearly three times the fortune of Larry Page, the Google co-founder ranked second on its rich list, according to AFP. AFP reported that a successful debut could make Musk the first person with a trillion-dollar fortune.

Nabil Ahmed, senior director of economic justice at Oxfam America, criticized that prospect. “A trillion dollars in the hands of one man is incompatible not only with an affordable economy, but also with a healthy democracy,” Ahmed said, according to AFP.

AFP reported that some Wall Street observers are focused on SpaceX’s financials and the scale of the assumptions behind its valuation. The company’s filing says it could generate more than $28.5 trillion in revenue across its markets, while its plans include space-based data centers and human missions to Mars using technology that AFP described as not yet proven.

SpaceX reported $18.7 billion in revenue in 2025, according to AFP, but it also posted a $4.9 billion net loss, mainly tied to spending on AI capacity. AFP reported that the company’s future also depends heavily on a broad expansion of Starlink satellite internet service and on xAI’s Grok chatbot gaining ground against rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

The IPO comes a little more than a year after Musk left President Donald Trump’s administration, where AFP reported he led the contentious DOGE effort to cut government spending. AFP also reported that activists displayed a giant inflatable Musk outside Nasdaq’s offices on the eve of the listing to protest Grok’s ability to create fake sexualized images.

This story draws on original reporting from Phys.org.