SpaceX Hits Nasdaq at $1.77 Trillion Valuation in Record $75 Billion IPO

SpaceX began trading Friday on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX after completing the largest initial public offering in history, raising $75 billion by selling 555.6 million shares at $135 apiece and valuing Elon Musk's rocket and satellite company at $1.77 trillion.

The debut makes SpaceX the seventh most-valuable publicly traded company in the United States, surpassing Meta Platforms and Tesla — Musk's electric vehicle company — based on market capitalization.

SpaceX disclosed the final terms in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission late Thursday. The deal also confirmed that Musk will retain 82.4% voting control of the company following the listing, according to IPO filings. A 366-day lock-up period prevents him from selling shares for at least a year.

Musk said in a JPMorgan Chase livestream held before the IPO that SpaceX had been cash-flow positive since approximately 2015 and that he wanted to access public markets to fund what he called "a significant growth phase." Plans outlined by the company include deploying more than 100,000 satellites for communications and constructing artificial intelligence data centers in orbit.

Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell, who has overseen day-to-day operations of SpaceX's 22,000-person full-time workforce since joining the company in 2002, said the timing of the offering reflects the company reaching a new level of organizational maturity. "I wasn't sure we would go public," Shotwell told CNBC in an exclusive interview. "It actually feels like the right time now."

Shotwell said SpaceX had needed to remain private in order to keep its focus on long-term objectives rather than quarterly results. "Today, across SpaceX's various businesses, the building blocks of a publicly traded company are now in place," she said.

The company's Falcon rocket fleet currently accounts for roughly 80% of global mass launched to orbit since 2023. Last year, SpaceX conducted 165 orbital missions, with 157 relying on reused boosters. The cost to send cargo to low Earth orbit has declined by more than 90% compared with the Space Shuttle era.

Starlink, the satellite broadband division, remains the only profitable segment of the business and serves as the primary source of cash for capital-intensive investments elsewhere. The service has more than 10 million subscribers and operates a constellation of roughly 9,600 satellites.

SpaceX acquired Musk's AI startup xAI in February 2026, bringing with it the Grok large language model, associated data centers, and the social network X. The company reported capital expenditures for AI of $12.7 billion in 2025 and $7.7 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone.

The IPO has not been without controversy. Protesters gathered in Times Square on Thursday, erecting a 40-foot inflatable depicting Musk and drawing attention to lawsuits and regulatory investigations tied to Grok's generation of sexualized imagery of real people, including minors. SpaceX disclosed in its prospectus that it had "recorded an accrual of $530 million for litigation losses that are probable and reasonably estimable" from those cases as of the end of 2025.

The company's prospectus also disclosed a cumulative deficit of $41.3 billion since its founding in 2002.

Skeptics on Wall Street have flagged the valuation's implied multiples — an estimated 40 times 2026 revenue and roughly 175 times adjusted earnings — as aggressive. SpaceX is also jointly developing Terafab, a semiconductor fabrication and computing project with Tesla, with Intel signed on as a partner; the total cost is expected to run into the hundreds of billions of dollars.

According to market data provider VandaTrack, retail investors have been rotating out of AI-adjacent holdings such as Micron, Advanced Micro Devices, and Marvell Technology in recent weeks, a move analysts at the firm attributed in part to individuals positioning for the SpaceX debut and anticipated future offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic.

Whether the company can sustain its valuation will depend heavily on the pace of Starlink's subscriber growth, the trajectory of its xAI integration, and how investors ultimately weigh Musk's long-horizon ambitions against near-term financial disclosures now that quarterly reporting is mandatory.

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