SpaceX IPO Tops $2 Trillion Market Cap as Google Stake Nears $100 Billion

SpaceX completed what the company has described as the largest IPO in history on Friday, with shares surging more than 19% to close at $160.95 on the Nasdaq, pushing the reusable rocket maker's market capitalization past $2 trillion on its first day of trading.

The debut underscores how deeply intertwined SpaceX has become with Alphabet's Google, even as the personal relationship between SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Google co-founder Larry Page has remained fractured for more than a decade.

Google holds roughly a 4.9% stake in SpaceX, the product of a $900 million investment made in 2015. At SpaceX's post-IPO valuation, that stake is now worth approximately $100 billion.

The financial ties between the two companies extend well beyond that original investment. Just ahead of the IPO, SpaceX announced a deal to lease AI infrastructure to Google for $920 million a month over 32 months — an arrangement that could generate roughly $30 billion in revenue for SpaceX's AI division.

SpaceX first became a significant Google Cloud customer in 2021, when the two companies struck a deal allowing SpaceX to use Google's private fiber-optic network to route connections for its Starlink satellite internet service. At the time, Starlink had approximately 1,500 satellites in orbit and around 500,000 subscribers.

The corporate closeness stands in contrast to the personal estrangement between Musk and Page, which Musk has traced to his 44th birthday party in June 2015. There, according to Musk's account, Page called him a "speciesist" during a conversation about the dangers of artificial intelligence. The two men have not repaired the relationship since.

Also in 2015 — the same year Google invested in SpaceX — Musk co-founded OpenAI alongside Sam Altman, with the stated goal of creating a "counterweight" to Google DeepMind. In messages that later emerged in court proceedings, Musk warned Altman that without a competing research effort, Google could gain monopolistic control over artificial intelligence.

The rivalry has since extended to autonomous vehicles. Waymo, Google's self-driving unit, launched its autonomous vehicle division in 2009 and now operates thousands of robotaxis providing more than 500,000 paid trips each week across 11 U.S. cities. Tesla, by contrast, had approximately 50 Robotaxi-branded vehicles operating mostly in Austin, Texas, as of recent public records, and has not yet brought its "FSD (Unsupervised)" system to market.

Despite the IPO's strong debut, analysts at TD Securities are directing investor attention toward a series of upcoming index inclusion events they consider more consequential than the listing itself.

Peter Haynes, the firm's head of index and market structure, told CNBC's "ETF Edge" that Day 15 after SpaceX's public debut — which he identified as July 6 — will mark Nasdaq's rebalancing of the 100 Index to incorporate SpaceX's IPO shares. Additional rebalancing events are expected as further shares become freely tradable.

In what Haynes called a "controversial decision," the S&P 500 Index Committee announced earlier this month that SpaceX would not be fast-tracked into the flagship index, meaning the company must trade on public markets for at least one year before becoming eligible for inclusion.

"That leaves us with the other benchmarks and their rebalancing schedule," Haynes said.

With Musk's net worth having surpassed $1 trillion and Page's sitting at just under $300 billion — making them the two wealthiest individuals in the world — the question of how their companies navigate an increasingly overlapping set of markets in AI, cloud infrastructure, and autonomous systems may prove more consequential than the index calendar alone.

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