The biggest IPO ever just priced low and is already trading like it knew better.
SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 a share and raised about $75 billion, the largest offering in market history. The reason it’s the day’s biggest story: indications point to a first trade near $169, roughly 27% higher, putting SpaceX on course to blow past a $2 trillion valuation the moment the bell stops ringing.
Picture the Nasdaq MarketSite this morning. A crowd spilling onto the sidewalk. Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president, rings the opening bell to audible cheers. Somewhere on a trading desk, a banker refreshes the order book and watches a number that started at $135 climb past $170 before a single public share has changed hands. That gap, the one between the price set last night and the price the market actually wants, is the whole story.
What Happened
SpaceX officially went public today on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX. It priced its offering at $135 per share, selling more than 555 million shares to raise roughly $75 billion. That makes it the largest IPO in history, comfortably past Saudi Aramco’s $29 billion record from 2019.
At the IPO price, SpaceX is worth about $1.75 trillion. But the early indications are running hot. The first trade was indicated around $169, and SpaceX-linked perpetual futures were changing hands near $172 to $176, about 27% to 30% above the offer price. Reuters reported the company was on course to blow past a $2 trillion valuation. Even the satellites in its orbit caught the updraft: EchoStar, which owns an estimated 3% of SpaceX, jumped 11% on Thursday, and AST SpaceMobile rose 12%.
The Backstory
SpaceX has been the most-watched private company on earth for years, and Elon Musk spent most of them insisting it would stay private. Founded in 2002 to build reusable rockets, it became NASA’s biggest launch partner after the shuttle program ended in 2011, then bolted on Starlink, a satellite internet constellation of roughly 10,000 satellites. More recently it absorbed xAI, bringing the Grok model and the Colossus supercomputer under the same roof.
The shift in Musk’s thinking tracked Starlink’s rise from science project to recurring-revenue machine. Once the cash engine was real, going public stopped being a threat and started being a lever.
The Plan
The listing hands SpaceX a war chest and hands the public something it has never had: a way to own a piece of rockets, satellite internet, and a frontier AI bet in one ticker. A bigger-than-expected open also resets the conversation. At $2 trillion, SpaceX vaults into the conversation with the largest companies on the planet, and Musk becomes the only person running two separate trillion-dollar public companies at once.
The Business Model Angle
Here is the pattern worth stealing. SpaceX built a wildly profitable, hard-to-copy core (reusable launch plus Starlink subscriptions), then used it to fund an absurdly ambitious frontier (Mars, AI, space-based compute). The core buys credibility. The frontier buys the multiple.
That is why a company can price at $135 and open near $169. Investors are not paying for last quarter. They are paying for a story about the next two decades, and SpaceX earned the right to tell it by delivering for the last two. The lesson for operators: a cash machine is what lets you sell a vision without lying. Build the boring engine first. The moonshot is only credible once something underneath it actually pays the bills.
The Risk
A pop is not a verdict, it is a mood. A first-day price set by limited supply and enormous hype is the easiest number to misread all year. SpaceX is being valued mostly on what it might earn around 2040, not on what it earns now, and the gap between a narrative and an income statement is debt that eventually comes due. Lockups will expire, more shares will hit the market, and the “$2 trillion” headline is a promise until quarterly results either back it or don’t. Buying the open at a 30% premium is buying the story at full retail.
Quick Questions
What price did SpaceX IPO at?
$135 per share, raising about $75 billion, the largest IPO ever.
What is SpaceX’s ticker?
SPCX, on the Nasdaq.
Why is the stock opening so much higher than the IPO price?
Demand far outran the supply of shares offered, so early indications pointed near $169, roughly 27% above the $135 price.
Is SpaceX really worth $2 trillion now?
At the indicated open it’s on track to clear $2 trillion in market value, but first-day prices are volatile and reflect hype as much as fundamentals.
The Business Model Analyst Take
The number that matters today isn’t $135 or $169. It’s the distance between them. That spread is the market telling you what a profitable core plus a believable frontier is worth: a premium you cannot manufacture with hype alone. For founders, the takeaway is unglamorous. Build the engine that prints cash, then earn the right to sell the dream. SpaceX did it in that order, and the order is the whole lesson.
Read the original story on CNBC. For the deeper breakdown, see our SpaceX business model analysis.
