Elon Musk is a trillionaire as SpaceX is set to surge 30% on debut

Shares of SpaceX appeared ready to jump when they started trading on Friday after Elon Musk’s company made history with a $75 billion IPO that instantly turned it into one of the biggest public companies in the world. 

Early indications of buying interest on Nasdaq pointed to a roughly 30% jump from the shares’ offering price of $135. The stock is expected to officially start trading later Friday under the ticker SPCX.

While SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, CFO Bret Johnsen and Musk’s mother, Maye, were among those gathered at Nasdaq MarketSite for the stock’s debut, Musk remained behind at the company’s headquarters in Starbase, Texas.

And many of his employees had other business to attend to: SpaceX launched 29 of its Starlink satellites into orbit on its Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, about an hour before US stock markets opened. 

“It is certainly hard to believe that a little company that started in a warehouse in El Segundo is now going public with the largest IPO ever,” Musk said in a livestream on X, the former Twitter that is now part of SpaceX. “

And let me tell you, if people had told me this was going to happen, I was like, man, you must be smoking some really good crack, because I think this company is going to fail.”

The IPO drew more than $350 billion in demand from institutions and retail investors, according to people familiar with the matter.

About 70% of the shares sold to institutions were allocated to so-called long-only investors in addition to sovereign wealth funds, the people said.

BlackRock sought to buy about $5 billion in the IPO while Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and Kuwait Investment Authority placed orders for shares worth $1 billion to $5 billion, Bloomberg News reported.

Among the firms that placed orders, close to one-third of them didn’t receive any stock, some of the people said. 

Despite all the enthusiasm for the listing, many investors were skeptical a company that has yet to turn a profit deserves such a hefty valuation.

“On the fundamentals, investors have got ahead of themselves,” said Amanda Lyons, head of research at Energy Group Capital Group, adding that she believes a sum-of-its-parts valuation would be about $600 billion, roughly one third of its IPO market capitalisation.

“But ‘expensive’ has never been a catalyst with Elon Musk, and betting against his premium has been a losing trade for a decade.”

Longtime believers in Musk, on the other hand, see value in the type of premium that gets attached to his companies

“The SpaceX IPO signals the transition point from a software-dominated world to a hardware-dominated world,” said Shaun Maguire, a partner with Sequoia Capital who has led the firm’s investments in Musk’s companies.

“This is true across the real economy, venture capital, the public markets; it is something that has been percolating behind the scenes for the last two to three years.”

Friday’s trading will be a critical test for the $1.8 trillion rocket, satellite and artificial intelligence company.

Even after raising the largest-ever amount in an IPO, SpaceX still needs the market’s validation of its ambition to dominate AI and carry humans to the moon and Mars, as well as the company’s controversial governance regime that promises Musk near-total control.

The unprecedented size of SpaceX’s debut makes market mechanics more complicated, and the fear of unexpected glitches like those that derailed Facebook’s IPO in 2012 is guaranteed to keep executives on edge.

The first trading day will not only set the tone for future sessions, but it will also affect the prospects for a pair of potential giant initial public offerings from SpaceX’s AI rivals Anthropic PBC and OpenAI.

“It presages a pretty sizable wave of IPOs,” John Waldron, president of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., said during a Bloomberg Television interview with Francine Lacqua.

“The capital markets are willing to finance these extraordinary companies as we build out AI infrastructure.”

The trading is also set to determine whether Musk becomes the world’s first trillionaire, a title that currently just exceeds his grasp. Musk’s fortune sits at about $970 billion as of Thursday, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Index, retail tailwinds

Among the unsatisfied investors whose IPO allocation potentially fell short of their desired amount are retail buyers. That cohort delivered more than $100 billion of demand, the majority of which wasn’t met since the group received about $15 billion in stock.

Another tailwind for the stock will be forced buying by index-tracking funds, which could generate as much as $6 billion in demand as they snap up shares ahead of the stock’s expected fast-track inclusion in benchmark gauges, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.

A large IPO is no guarantee of a standout session, however, and the fragile sentiment around newly listed companies means some never recover from trading below their offer price on day one. Even some firms that soar after their IPOs fail to maintain the momentum.

For US IPOs raising at least $1 billion, the record for the biggest day-one gain belongs to design software maker Figma, which rose 250% in its 2025 debut, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

It gave up the increase and is now about 45% below its IPO price.

Stablecoin firm Circle Internet, another listing from 2025, climbed 168% on its first day. It remains at roughly the same level above the IPO price.

Companies with negative net income tend to lag by more than 10% over the first 18 months after their listing compared with profitable peers, according to a Trivariate Research report last year.

SpaceX had a net loss of $4.28 billion in the first quarter of 2026.

At least some of the price action in post-IPO trading is due to the relatively small number of shares made available. SpaceX’s IPO is an outlier even by normal standards, with roughly 4.2% of its outstanding shares available to trade on day one.

While a small float can lead to volatility for the company, some are more concerned about what happens to the broader market when insiders can sell more stock as so-called lock-up agreements expire.

“The tricky part for me is as the float unlocks, how that’s absorbed over time,” said Jeremiah Buckley, a portfolio manager with Janus Henderson Investors. 

“I don’t think absorbing a $75 billion IPO is that impactful, but if we’re talking about absorbing a trillion dollars in float that needs to come from somewhere, and that makes me more nervous,” Buckley said.

Tesla merger

SpaceX’s early performance is likely to play an outsized role in what many investors see as Musk’s endgame — a merger with Tesla.

This would create a long-discussed Elon Inc. that would let investors buy into a single company that combines all of his visions of robots, autonomous cars, AI and data centres in space in one stock.

While nothing has been formally announced, investors pushed the company to consider a SpaceX-Tesla merger in January, Bloomberg News reported, before the xAI deal was made public.

A tie-up after SpaceX’s IPO is just a matter of time, early investor Peter Diamandis told Bloomberg TV in May.

“There’s no question that there are synergies between Tesla and SpaceX in our futures,” SpaceX’s Shotwell told CNBC. “Right now, I’m focused on keeping the lights on here.”

Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase led the deal with 18 other banks participating. The company is formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp. 

With Wall Street already lining up to give SpaceX price targets as high as $190, the debate over Musk’s dream of making humans a multiplanetary species is about to begin.

To Nirgunan Tiruchelvam, an analyst at Aletheia Capital in Singapore, the IPO carries symbolic significance in the same way that Alibaba’s 2014 listing represented the rise of China and e-commerce.

“In this case, the SpaceX IPO is a bellwether for the state of the market,” Tiruchelvam said. “SpaceX represents the AI-driven tech boom and the rise of space technology as one of the defining forces of our time.”