SpaceX’s $75B IPO Could Make Musk First Trillionaire

The biggest stock debut in history is about to rewrite the wealth records, and one short trading day could crown a trillionaire.

SpaceX just priced the largest IPO ever, selling more than 555 million shares at $135 each to raise around $75 billion and lock in a $1.77 trillion valuation. Why it matters: a small first-day pop could push Elon Musk’s stake past $1 trillion, making him the world’s first trillionaire as early as Friday.

Picture this. It’s Friday morning on Wall Street, and a rocket company that spent two decades blowing up prototypes in the Texas scrub is about to open trading as the most valuable debut the market has ever seen. The ticker is SPCX. The opening bell hasn’t even rung, and the record books are already being rewritten.

What Happened

On Thursday, SpaceX confirmed its IPO price at $135 a share and said it would sell more than 555 million shares. That math lands the company around $75 billion in fresh capital and a $1.77 trillion valuation.

For scale, that shatters the previous record holder. Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil giant, was valued at $1.7 trillion and raised more than $29 billion when it went public in 2019. SpaceX is raising roughly two and a half times that haul, and it begins trading Friday under the ticker SPCX.

The personal numbers are the eye-catching part. At $135 a share, Musk’s controlling stake is worth more than $860 billion. A slight bump in the first days of trading tips the 54-year-old founder over $1 trillion and into trillionaire territory, a first for anyone, anywhere.

The Backstory

Musk founded SpaceX in 2002, and for most of that run the company was a financial black box. It revealed a full picture of its books for the first time only last month, in the IPO prospectus.

The reveal was a mixed bag. Revenue hit $18.7 billion last year, up 33 percent from the year before. But the company also lost more than $4.9 billion, a sharp reversal from a $791 million profit in 2024. The cause: a spending spree on artificial intelligence.

That AI pivot is no accident. In February, SpaceX bought Musk’s AI company, xAI, which owned his social media platform, X. The rocket maker is now also an AI player, folded into an empire that already includes Tesla, the Starlink satellite internet service, and more.

The Plan

The debut may be even bigger than the headline number. Underwriters Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley hold an option to buy an extra 83 million shares to sell to investors. If they exercise it, the raise climbs past $86 billion.

SpaceX is also the opening act for a much larger show. Anthropic, the AI startup behind the Claude chatbot, and its rival OpenAI have both confidentially filed to go public in recent days, each valued near $1 trillion. If those land, the market is staring down a cluster of trillion-dollar companies hitting public exchanges for the first time, plus an avalanche of new wealth washing across Silicon Valley and Wall Street.

It won’t just enrich the already-rich. An analysis from investment platform Hill.com estimated that more than 4,400 current and former SpaceX employees are likely to become millionaires from the IPO, with around 400 of them clearing $100 million or more.

The Business Model Angle

Here’s the pattern worth studying: SpaceX is selling belief at least as much as it’s selling balance sheets. A company that lost $4.9 billion last year is going public at $1.77 trillion. That gap is the narrative premium, and Musk has spent twenty years building the credibility to charge it.

But there’s real machinery under the story. Reusable rockets crushed launch costs, and Starlink layered recurring, subscription-style revenue on top of lumpy government launch contracts. That combination, a cost moat plus a recurring revenue engine, is what lets a deficit-running company command a record valuation. Vision opens the door; the business model is what keeps investors in the room.

The lesson for founders: a credible long-term story is a balance-sheet asset, but only when it sits on top of a real moat and a path to durable revenue. And note the quieter play here, equity as a retention weapon. Those 4,400 employee millionaires are the payoff for two decades of accepting risky paychecks over the safe job. That’s how you keep talent through the explosions.

The Risk

Now the cold water. Plenty of investors think $1.77 trillion is a fantasy price for a company hemorrhaging cash.

Jim Chanos, the short-seller who famously called Enron’s collapse, compared the hype to the Wizard of Oz waving people away from the curtain. The skeptic case is straightforward: Musk has a long history of overpromising, and some of SpaceX’s loftiest goals, like launching AI data centers into orbit or building factories on the moon, are nowhere near proven feasible. The offering has drawn enough heat that questions about its financial projections have reached the SEC.

The counter-bet is just as simple. Musk has disrupted industries before, and his fans keep reposting a line attributed to Peter Thiel: “Never bet against Elon.” Both things can be true. The vision is genuinely bold, and the valuation is genuinely stretched. Friday’s open is where those two stories collide.

Quick Questions

The Business Model Analyst Take

SpaceX is the clearest proof yet that a great story plus a real moat beats either one alone. The $4.9 billion loss is the part skeptics shout about; the reusable rockets and recurring Starlink revenue are the part that actually justifies the room. For founders, the takeaway isn’t “sell a bigger dream.” It’s “build the engine that makes the dream investable, then let the narrative do the rest.” The market is about to vote on whether Musk has done both. Either way, the playbook is on full display.

Source: The New York Times. For the deeper breakdown of how the company actually earns, see our SpaceX business model analysis.