Elon Musk’s SpaceX has officially priced its record initial public offering at $135 per share, catapulting the rocket firm among the world’s most valuable companies ahead of its Friday debut.
The hotly anticipated IPO raised $75 billion while selling 555.6 million shares, according to a statement posted on SpaceX’s website on Thursday afternoon. The company will trade on the Nasdaq Composite Index under the ticket “SPCX.”
It’s going public at an approximately $1.77 trillion valuation – which will instantly establish it as the seventh-largest US firm. It will be more valuable than tech mainstays like Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta and Musk’s other company, electric car maker Tesla.
The IPO for SpaceX — which owns artificial intelligence company xAI, satellite-internet business Starlink and social media platform X — shattered the previous record set by Saudi Aramco’s IPO, which raised $29.4 billion in 2019.
Musk himself is now close to becoming the first trillionaire in history. His personal net worth was $792 billion as of Thursday, according to Forbes.
SpaceX’s board has already teed up a massive pay package for Musk tied to the company’s success. The South African billionaire can earn 1 billion Class B shares that will vest if the company establishes “a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants.” The plan marks an unusual instance of a company tying executive pay to metrics other than typical financial ones.
There are also rewards for hitting a $7.5 trillion market cap and building “non-Earth-based data centers.
After the IPO, Musk will control about 82% of SpaceX, according to Reuters.
SpaceX is kicking off a series of hotly anticipated AI IPOs, with Anthropic and OpenAI expected to go public later this year.
“SpaceX going public is an important moment for the broader tech sector in our view as this AI Revolution and data takes this next step forward,” said Wedbush analyst Dan Ives.
The public debut drew massive interest from retail investors who submitted more than $100 billion in purchase orders, according to Bloomberg.
The IPO was four times oversubscribed, meaning there were four times as many purchase orders as there were available shares.
While SpaceX is expected to make at least 20% of shares available to individuals in its IPO, that number would still mean that just a fraction of run-of-the-mill investors who want to buy shares will actually be able to do so, with the rest going to big institutions.
Some crypto traders are reportedly taking a bullish view of SpaceX’s prospects.
Futures contracts tied to SpaceX’s stock that are sold on crypto platforms Hyperliquid and Binance were trading at $165 as of Thursday morning, according to Bloomberg.
Despite the massive demand, some market watchers have warned that SpaceX’s balance sheet is too weak to justify its valuation.
SpaceX disclosed $4.9 billion in losses last year alone on revenue of $18.7 billion – with the gap expected to widen even more as Musk pursues costly out-of-this world goals that include AI data centers in space and vacations to the Moon.
The company’s price-to-earnings ratio is roughly 100. By comparison, chip titan Nvidia has a ratio of around 20 to 25.
Musk took steps to reassure Wall Street ahead of launch day.
The company announced an agreement to rent its Colossus 1 AI data center to Anthropic for $1.25 billion a month, and a similar $920 million deal with Google, which is a major SpaceX shareholder.
