SpaceX Goes Public in Record $75 Billion IPO, Making Elon Musk the World's First Trillionaire
On June 12, 2026, SpaceX went public on Nasdaq under the ticker "SPCX," raising $75 billion in the largest initial public offering in history. By the end of the trading day, Elon Musk's combined holdings in SpaceX and Tesla pushed his net worth past $1.1 trillion, a figure no individual had previously reached.
A record-setting debut on Nasdaq
SpaceX priced 555.6 million Class A shares at $135 each, immediately valuing the company at $1.77 trillion. Shares opened at $150 and climbed as high as $176.52 before closing at $160.95, a 19% gain on the first day. The deal was more than double the size of Saudi Aramco's $29.4 billion listing in 2019, which had held the previous record.
Retail investors showed unusual appetite for the deal. Bloomberg reported that individual investors submitted more than $70 billion in requests for shares, and SpaceX allocated roughly 20% of the offering to retail buyers. By the time trading wrapped, dollar volume in SPCX alone had topped $33 billion, outpacing the QQQ and SPY ETFs for the session.
What the company actually looks like
The IPO math was striking. SpaceX lost $8.7 billion between early 2025 and March 2026, with most of those losses coming from its AI division, xAI, which it acquired in February 2026. The only profitable segment today is Starlink, the satellite internet business that drives roughly 80% of the company's revenue.
Morningstar put its fair-value estimate at $63 per share, roughly half the IPO price. The firm calculated the offering at about 94 times revenue, compared to 22 times for Meta and 18 times for Amazon. For the valuation to make sense on fundamentals alone, SpaceX would need to grow its earnings roughly 75-fold by 2035.
None of that dampened demand. Investors appear to be buying the vision: 100,000 satellites in orbit, AI data centers in space, and what Musk described as a "significant growth phase." He rang the Nasdaq bell from Starbase, SpaceX's South Texas facility, saying the company had been cash-flow positive since around 2015.
The governance trade-off investors are accepting
Musk retained control of more than 80% of shareholder voting power through a super-voting share structure. That means new shareholders have very limited ability to challenge management decisions, regardless of how much of the company they own.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren called for a wealth tax in response, noting that Musk's new fortune was larger than what most American households could accumulate in 11 million years of work. Officials from pension funds in California and New York had sent a letter to SpaceX before the IPO closed objecting to the structure.
What comes next
SpaceX was the first of three major AI-era IPOs expected in 2026. Both Anthropic and OpenAI have filed confidential paperwork with the SEC, though neither has set a date. Nasdaq also revised its index rules to fast-track SpaceX into Nasdaq-100 funds within 15 days of listing, which will send shares into millions of passive portfolios whether those investors chose it or not.
For now, Musk's net worth has fluctuated around the trillion-dollar mark as the stock has moved. SpaceX shares reportedly crossed $200 in the weeks after the IPO before pulling back toward the listing price by early July. Paper trillionaire status, it turns out, is not especially stable. But the record stands: as of June 12, 2026, one person crossed a threshold that economists had long debated would ever be reached at all.