SpaceX Just Pulled Off the Biggest IPO in History

SpaceX Just Pulled Off the Biggest IPO in History. Here’s What Actually Happened.

For more than two decades, SpaceX was the white whale of private markets — the company everyone wanted a piece of and almost no one could touch. That era ended today. On Friday, June 12, SpaceX began trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX, capping the largest initial public offering ever recorded.

The numbers are hard to overstate. SpaceX sold roughly 555.6 million Class A shares at $135 apiece, raising $75 billion — a figure that doesn’t just break the previous IPO record, it laps it several times over. The offering valued the company at approximately $1.77 trillion out of the gate, instantly making it the seventh-largest U.S. company by market cap and nudging it just ahead of Tesla, Elon Musk’s other trillion-dollar-class business.

And then the market opened.

A debut measured in trillions

SPCX began trading just above $150 a share, a roughly 13% pop from its offer price. Within minutes, the stock crossed $160 — enough to push SpaceX past a $2 trillion market capitalization. Only five other American companies have ever reached that mark: Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon. SpaceX did it on day one.

The demand was never really in doubt. By some estimates the offering was more than three times oversubscribed, and indications of interest before the open ranged as high as $175 a share before settling lower. Underwriters also hold a 30-day greenshoe option to sell roughly 83 million additional shares — worth around $11 billion at the offer price — if demand keeps outstripping supply. Early signs suggest it will.

The first-day surge had one other headline-grabbing side effect: it lifted Musk’s personal net worth above $1 trillion.

Why this IPO was different

Beyond its sheer size, this offering broke with convention in how it courted everyday investors. IPO allocations have traditionally gone almost entirely to institutions, but SpaceX shares were distributed through retail-friendly platforms including Fidelity, Robinhood, SoFi, E*Trade, and Charles Schwab. Fidelity reportedly dropped its IPO participation threshold from as much as $500,000 in account assets to just $2,000 for this deal — a striking signal of how much the company wanted ordinary investors in the room.

It’s a fitting approach for a stock that has long had a cult following it couldn’t legally serve. Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with the stated goal of reaching Mars; in the years since, it has become the dominant force in commercial launch, built the Starlink satellite internet constellation into a major consumer business, and positioned itself at the intersection of two of the market’s favorite themes: space and AI.

What investors should watch now

SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell told CNBC ahead of the open that shareholders should focus on three things: progress on Starship, the company’s fully reusable heavy-lift rocket; consumer growth in Starlink and Starlink mobile; and the company’s expanding AI ambitions. That framing matters — it positions SpaceX less as a rocket company and more as an infrastructure platform with a rocket division.

Wall Street seems inclined to agree. Sequoia Capital partner Sean Maguire compared SpaceX today to Nvidia three years ago, citing his confidence in explosive revenue growth and saying he plans to hold his shares indefinitely.

There’s also a structural catalyst on the near horizon. Under Nasdaq’s fast-entry rules, newly listed mega-caps can become eligible for Nasdaq-100 inclusion after roughly 15 trading days — meaning index funds tracking the benchmark could be forced buyers of SPCX as early as the first week of July. Traders are already positioning for it.

The bottom line

First-day euphoria is not a business model, and a $2 trillion valuation bakes in years of flawless execution on technology — orbital data centers among them — that remains unproven. Volatility in the opening weeks is all but guaranteed, and analysts have warned as much.

But as a market event, today was singular. The most valuable private company in the world is private no longer, and the public markets just told us exactly what they think it’s worth: more than almost anything else on Earth.