As the opening bell rings at New York’s Nasdaq exchange in Times Square on Friday, one of the most anticipated and largest initial public offerings in Wall Street history is set to get underway: Elon Musk’s SpaceX is making its public debut, a milestone that redefines the boundaries of private sector ambition and billionaire wealth.
On Thursday, SpaceX filed documentation with U.S. market regulators confirming its pricing of more than 555 million shares at $135 apiece. The valuation lands just under $1.8 trillion, catapulting the aerospace and technology conglomerate into the top 10 of the largest publicly traded companies on Wall Street—surpassing the current market capitalizations of Tesla, Meta Platforms, and Walmart. The primary share offering alone is projected to raise more than $75 billion, smashing the previous IPO record set by Saudi Aramco’s $29.4 billion 2019 debut. If underwriters exercise options for an additional 83 million shares, total proceeds could climb above $86 billion, a figure unmatched in the history of public markets.
Founded by Musk as a small rocket startup in 2002, SpaceX has expanded far beyond its original mission of interplanetary exploration. Today, it operates the world’s largest commercial satellite constellation through Starlink, functions as a primary launch provider for NASA and commercial missions, and has absorbed Musk’s artificial intelligence firm xAI—along with the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. Trading under the ticker symbol “SPCX”, SpaceX leads the wave of major AI-focused companies preparing to enter public markets, beating competitors OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which have only recently filed initial regulatory documentation for their own planned offerings.
The record-breaking listing comes just over one year after Musk stepped back from his role in former President Donald Trump’s administration, where he led the controversial “DOGE” initiative aimed at slashing federal government spending while holding onto his CEO positions at both Tesla and SpaceX. In recent years, Musk has transformed from a broadly celebrated technology innovator into one of the world’s most polarizing public figures: his open support for Trump and right-wing populist movements across Europe, paired with a long history of incendiary statements on X, has drawn widespread criticism and public pushback.
Even amid this controversy, investor enthusiasm for the IPO has been unprecedented. Bloomberg reports that the offering was more than four times oversubscribed, with strong demand from both institutional and retail investors—who have been allocated 20 percent of the available shares. The IPO is expected to create thousands of new millionaires and multiple new billionaires, as current and former employees, as well as early backers from the company’s 23-year history, prepare to cash out a portion of their long-held stakes. If the debut performs as expected, Musk will become the first person in recorded history to hold a net worth exceeding $1 trillion, a milestone that would push his fortune to nearly three times that of the world’s second-richest person, Google co-founder Larry Page. Entering Friday’s trading session, Musk’s current net worth already stands at $782 billion, per Forbes’ real-time billionaire rankings.
Not all observers have welcomed the historic offering, however. Oxfam America senior director of economic justice Nabil Ahmed argued that a trillion-dollar fortune held by a single individual is incompatible with both an equitable economy and a functional healthy democracy. On the eve of the listing, activist protesters positioned a giant inflatable of Musk outside Nasdaq’s headquarters to draw attention to concerns that xAI’s Grok chatbot can be used to generate non-consensual deepfake sexual imagery.
Wall Street analysts also remain divided over the sustainability of SpaceX’s near-$1.8 trillion valuation. The company’s ambitious growth projections rely on Musk delivering on a slate of science fiction-level promises that require unproven technology, including placing data centers in low-Earth orbit and establishing permanent human settlements on Mars. Much of the company’s long-term value is also tied to the massive expansion of Starlink satellite internet and the growth of xAI’s Grok chatbot, which has so far failed to gain significant market traction against competitors like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. While SpaceX grew rapidly to $18.7 billion in revenue in 2025, it also posted a net loss of $4.9 billion for the year, driven largely by massive capital spending to expand AI computing capacity. In its public filing, SpaceX projects it could eventually generate more than $28.5 trillion in cumulative revenue across its operating segments—a prediction that has left many market observers skeptical.
As markets open on Friday, all eyes are on Wall Street’s reaction to the offering, which will set a precedent for the wave of big tech and AI IPOs expected to follow in the coming months.