A record that stood for six years just got doubled in a single Friday, and the world got its first trillionaire in the process.
SpaceX became the largest IPO ever, raising roughly twice the previous record set by Saudi Aramco in 2019. The reason: investors are betting big on Elon Musk’s bundle of rockets, satellites, AI, and social media. The offering valued SpaceX at $1.77 trillion and made Musk the first trillionaire.
Picture a chart of the 100 biggest IPOs of the last three decades. One blue dot floats so far above the rest it barely fits on the page. That dot is SpaceX, and it just rewrote the record books in a way no company has come close to before.
What Happened
SpaceX went public this week and instantly became the biggest IPO in history. The stock started trading Friday at an IPO price of $135 a share, putting the company’s value at $1.77 trillion.
The raise came in at roughly twice the old record. For context, the previous champion was Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil giant, which pulled in $29 billion back in 2019 (about $38 billion in today’s money). SpaceX roughly doubled that.
And the cherry on top: Elon Musk, already the richest person alive, became the world’s first trillionaire the moment shares started trading.
The Backstory
Records like this do not fall often. Aramco’s stood for over six years, and it captured the oil industry flexing at its absolute peak.
Before that, the splashy names were ride-hailing twins Uber and Lyft, which both went public in spring 2019 to enormous hype. The twist: their stocks stumbled out of the gate, leaving investors wondering whether public markets actually shared the private-market excitement. So the IPO hall of fame is a mix of triumph and cold water.
To grasp the scale here, SpaceX’s roughly $75 billion raise was bigger than every US IPO in 2023 and 2024 combined, and nearly matched all the offerings from last year. Rewind to 2003 and every IPO in the US added up to just $33 billion in today’s dollars. SpaceX more than doubled that all by itself.
The Plan
This is not just a rocket company anymore. The SpaceX that went public bundles rockets, satellites, artificial intelligence, and even social media under one roof.
Musk has been busy stitching his empire together. SpaceX acquired xAI, another Musk-controlled company, in February, and has a deal to scoop up Cursor, an AI-assisted coding startup, this year.
The banks running the deal also hold an option to sell an extra 83 million shares over the coming month, which means the final tally could climb even higher. Translation: the record might get even more lopsided before the dust settles.
The Business Model Angle
Here is the pattern worth understanding: SpaceX is not being valued on what it earns today. It is being valued on a story about what it could earn tomorrow.
IPO expert Jay Ritter of the University of Florida put it plainly. The valuations of SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic, he noted, are not built on current profits or even current revenue, but on optimistic and not totally implausible scenarios for becoming enormously profitable someday.
That is the narrative premium in action. When you fuse a credible visionary, a category nobody else dominates, and a believable path to massive future cash flow, investors will pay for the trajectory, not the spreadsheet. If you want to see how the rockets-plus-Starlink machine actually generates cash, here is the breakdown of SpaceX’s business model. Founders, take note: the multiple lives in the story, but the story has to be plausible.
The Risk
The honest counterpoint: a story-driven valuation is a double-edged rocket. SpaceX’s debut is being treated as a barometer for the entire AI boom, with OpenAI and Anthropic lining up their own IPOs behind it.
If SpaceX’s stock wobbles the way Uber and Lyft did in 2019, the read-through gets ugly fast for everyone betting on AI mania. “Not totally implausible” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that valuation. Optimistic scenarios are still scenarios, not earnings, and a $1.77 trillion price tag leaves very little room for the future to disappoint.
Quick Questions
How big was SpaceX’s IPO exactly?
It became the largest IPO in history, raising roughly twice the previous record. SpaceX’s offering came in around $75 billion, valuing the company at $1.77 trillion at the $135 IPO price.
Who held the IPO record before SpaceX?
Saudi Aramco, the Saudi state oil company, which raised $29 billion in 2019 (about $38 billion adjusted for inflation). SpaceX roughly doubled it.
Is Elon Musk really a trillionaire now?
Yes. When SpaceX shares started trading Friday, Musk, already the richest person in the world, became the first trillionaire.
Why is SpaceX worth $1.77 trillion if it is mostly rockets?
Because it is no longer just rockets. The company now bundles satellites, AI, and social media, and investors are pricing in optimistic future profits more than today’s numbers.
The Business Model Analyst Take
SpaceX did not just break a record, it bent the chart. The lesson for founders is not “go raise $75 billion.” It is that markets pay a premium for a believable future, and the most valuable thing a company can own is a credible story about where it is going.
Musk fused rockets, satellites, AI, and a Mars-sized vision into one ticker, and investors bought the trajectory. Build something where the upside is huge and the path is plausible, and the dream itself becomes the asset. Just remember the flip side: when you sell the future, you have to keep delivering it.
Source: The New York Times
