SpaceX's record $75 billion IPO creates the world's first trillionaire

The debut

SpaceX entered the New York Stock Exchange on Friday at $150 per share, up 11 percent from its $135 offer price, giving it a market capitalisation of $1.96 trillion. The offering of 555.6 million shares raised $75 billion, tripling the previous record set by Saudi Aramco in 2019 and making it the largest IPO ever. Allocation was unusually tilted toward individuals, with about 30 percent of new shares reserved for retail investors, a sharp departure from the typical 5 percent.

SpaceX is giving 30% of its shares to retail investors. Companies usually give about 5%. So they are really going to depend on people at home, on their trading accounts, to keep this going, and that introduces volatility risk.

Musk's fortune

The listing instantly made Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire. Forbes put his net worth at $1.1 trillion, roughly €950 billion, more than three times Portugal's GDP. The second-wealthiest person has oscillated around $300 billion, and only Larry Ellison has previously reached the 400-billion-euro threshold.

The fortune of the second richest person has been fluctuating around $300 billion, less than a third of what Musk now holds, and only one other person – Larry Ellison – has ever been worth 400 billion euros.

Ambitions and deep losses

Musk said the company is going public because it needs money to place satellites and data centres in orbit and eventually establish a colony of one million people on Mars. SpaceX also aims to beat Anthropic and OpenAI in the race to profit from artificial intelligence. Between the start of 2025 and 31 March 2026, the company lost $8.7 billion as it financed these goals.

Twenty-five years of improbable odds

When Musk first entertained building his own rockets, college roommate Adeo Ressi organised a panel of space experts to dissuade him. Musk later admitted he gave the venture less than a 10 percent chance of success. Speaking at the company's Starbase headquarters in Texas on IPO day, he recalled the early scepticism.

I told people: 'It will probably fail. But we should try.'

Expert caution and the valuation question

Jay Ritter, a professor known as "Mr. IPO," acknowledged SpaceX's unique position but warned that many things must go right for investors to avoid disappointment. He pointed to winner-take-all network effects and the immense cost of replicating the technology as justifications for the valuation, yet stressed that public-market investors are betting on a distant future. On the eve of the listing, a giant inflatable Musk figure appeared in Times Square alongside criticism of his AI tool Grok, which was accused of generating explicit imagery of children, and warnings about the extreme concentration of wealth among a handful of billionaires.