SpaceX’s $75 billion Nasdaq debut turns Elon Musk into the first trillionaire
SpaceX raised $75 billion in the largest IPO in history. The closing price on its first trading day lifted Elon Musk’s net worth past $1 trillion, a milestone never reached before.
The largest IPO ever
SpaceX sold 555.6 million shares at $135 each, collecting $75 billion and giving the company a valuation near $1.8 trillion before the opening bell. The offering surpassed the previous record held by Saudi Aramco, which raised $29.4 billion in 2019. Orders exceeded the available shares by more than three times, with about one third of demand coming from retail investors. A greenshoe option covering roughly 83 million additional shares could push total proceeds above $86 billion in the coming weeks.
- SpaceX (2026)
- 75 billion USD
- Saudi Aramco (2019)
- 29.4 billion USD
- Agricultural Bank of China (2010)
- 22.1 billion USD
- Alibaba (2014)
- 21.8 billion USD
- SoftBank Corp. (2018)
- 21.3 billion USD
- Industrial & Commercial Bank of China (2006)
- 19.1 billion USD
- NTT DoCoMo (1998)
- 18.4 billion USD
- Visa (2008)
- 17.9 billion USD
First day on the Nasdaq
Shares began trading on 12 June under the ticker SPCX, opening at $150, 11 percent above the IPO price. The stock climbed as high as $176.52 intraday before settling at $161.11, a gain of 19.35 percent. The closing price gave SpaceX a market value of around $2.1 trillion, making it the sixth most valuable US-listed company after Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon. Morgan Stanley, the stabilisation agent, can step in to support the stock if it falls during the first thirty days.
The first trillion-dollar fortune
Elon Musk owns about 40 percent of SpaceX, a stake worth more than $800 billion at the closing price. Combined with his Tesla holding (roughly $280 billion) and smaller positions in Neuralink and The Boring Company (around $10 billion), his paper net worth reached approximately $1.15 trillion, according to Forbes estimates cited by Il Messaggero. The figure exceeds the combined GDP of Sweden, Taiwan and Ireland, and leaves only about twenty national economies on Earth ahead of his personal wealth.
- SpaceX stake
- 766 billion USD
- Tesla stake and options
- 280 billion USD
- Neuralink & The Boring Company
- 10 billion USD
Musk’s lock-up and audacious targets
Musk cannot sell his SpaceX shares for at least two years and must hit three performance milestones: a market capitalisation of $7.5 trillion, orbital data centres delivering 100 terawatts of compute power per year, and a permanent Martian colony with at least one million residents. After ringing the opening bell outside the Nasdaq MarketSite, he told attendees,
His mother Maye attended the Times Square ceremony, while his brother Kimbal joined him at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in Texas.It is hard to believe a small company came to achieve the largest IPO in history.
The question is: is the price right? Too high or too low? We will probably know in ten years, when we can tell if buying today was a great choice.
A company betting on AI and Mars
SpaceX posted a loss of $4.94 billion on revenue of $18.67 billion last year, a reminder that investors are paying for a future vision rather than current profits. The company expects artificial intelligence to become its largest business, especially through data centres in space that could harness solar energy without terrestrial constraints. Critics highlight construction costs, cooling challenges in a vacuum, and radiation risks to circuitry. Beyond AI, the IPO proceeds are meant to accelerate the Starlink satellite network, deep-space infrastructure, and lunar resource extraction.
