SpaceX’s Trillion-Dollar Debut
Elon Musk now holds a title no one has held before. SpaceX went public on Nasdaq on Friday, and the share sale lifted his fortune past $1 trillion, making the 54-year-old the first trillionaire on record. The rocket, satellite, and AI company raised $75 billion, the largest IPO ever completed, and Musk’s ownership stake did the rest. The euphoria did not last long. By the middle of the week, the stock had already handed back a chunk of its gains.
Key Takeaways
- SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 a share and raised $75 billion, the biggest share sale in history, with Musk’s net worth climbing above $1.1 trillion as trading opened.
- The stock jumped roughly 40% in its first three sessions, briefly pushing SpaceX past Amazon and Microsoft, before pulling back on Wednesday.
- SpaceX still loses billions each quarter, and analysts question whether its fundamentals can grow into a valuation that touched $2.66 trillion.
Inside the Record IPO
SpaceX sold 555,555,555 shares at $135 each. That priced the company near $1.77 trillion at the open, topping Saudi Aramco’s 2019 listing as the largest debut ever. Shares trade under the ticker SPCX.
Demand ran far ahead of supply. Orders reached roughly $250 billion, nearly four times the shares on offer, and the company trimmed the slice set aside for retail buyers as institutions fought for room.
The cash arrives at a useful moment. SpaceX posted a net loss of $4.9 billion for full-year 2025, then lost another $4.28 billion in the first quarter of 2026 on revenue of $4.69 billion. Its prospectus points the new money toward AI compute, launch vehicles, and satellite constellations.
Most of Musk’s wealth now sits inside the company, where his holding is valued near $866 billion. Add Tesla and his other ventures, and his total net worth tops $1.1 trillion, based on company filings. The figure includes stock that vests over time. Before the sale, Forbes pegged him at about $780 billion, already far ahead of Alphabet co-founder Larry Page in second place.
“The second richest person has been hovering around $300 billion, so about less than one-third of what Musk can potentially be worth tomorrow,” said Matt Durot, deputy editor at Forbes Wealth. “And only one other person, (Oracle founder) Larry Ellison, has ever been worth $400 billion.”
The Rally Cools
The early days were a sprint. Shares opened above the IPO price and kept climbing, rising about 40% through Tuesday’s close. At the peak, SpaceX leapfrogged Amazon and, for a moment, Microsoft, joining the four most valuable companies in the United States. Tuesday’s close put its value at $2.66 trillion.
Then came Wednesday. SpaceX still spends far more than it earns, and a price near $2.66 trillion asks investors to pay for results that may take years to arrive. The doubt building midweek came straight from that gap between the pitch and the books, and it sent the shares lower for the first time since the debut.
“Investors are trading the story, they’re trading the action, they’re trading the excitement, they’re trading Elon Musk, but at some point the rubber meets the road in terms of the fundamentals having to match up with that excitement,” said Peter Boockvar, chief investment officer at One Point BFG Wealth Partners, on CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia.” “If they can deliver, then the upside is certainly there, but the valuation is so enormous that the company is going to really have to show itself in growing into that valuation,” he added. “I think that that’s going to take at least a couple of years.”
Musk framed the long game himself. In a post on X on Sunday, he wrote that the company “might be able to reach approximately” $1 trillion in revenue by 2030, a target that dwarfs its current sales.
The Elon Premium
Investors have a name for the distance between SpaceX’s books and its market value: the “Elon premium.” It is a wager on the man more than on any spreadsheet.
“Much like Tesla, SpaceX is a bet on Elon Musk,” said Matt Kennedy, senior strategist at Renaissance Capital. “A market cap of $1.5 trillion-$2 trillion would certainly throw all traditional valuation methodologies out the window, and is instead best characterized as the ‘Elon Musk premium.’”
That wager rests partly on hardware that already works. Weeks before the listing, the company’s giant rocket completed a successful Starship V3 test flight that deployed Starlink satellites and survived re-entry, giving the roadshow a timely demonstration. SpaceX also folded in Musk’s AI startup xAI in February, pulling the Grok chatbot and the X platform into the rocket maker in a deal that valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion, the largest merger ever recorded.
SpaceX is also the opening act in a run of giant listings that will test how public markets price the AI era. Two of artificial intelligence’s biggest names, Anthropic and OpenAI, have lined up their own debuts, with both filing paperwork for offerings expected above $1 trillion. The way SpaceX trades from here will color how ordinary investors and pension funds approach those deals, since each one asks the public to fund years of losses on the promise of a later payoff. For a generation of savers, the rocket maker is the first live test of whether that promise is worth the price.
Musk Unfiltered
Few business figures fill as much cultural space as Musk. Public feeling toward extreme wealth has soured, yet he keeps a devoted following without the folksy warmth that made tycoons like Warren Buffett easy to like. Admirers read his no-filter style as the point. Critics see oligarch-scale power, weak governance, and a growing taste for partisan politics.
He was born in Pretoria, South Africa, to a Canadian mother and a South African father, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997. He took over as Tesla’s CEO in 2008, betting that electric cars could pair speed with software. Tesla’s rise, and its trillion-dollar-plus market cap, pushed legacy automakers toward EVs after years of dismissing the threat.
“He renewed the world’s respect for American ingenuity in automotive engineering,” said Bob Lutz, a former General Motors vice chairman.
The $44 billion purchase of Twitter in 2022 handed Musk a direct line to hundreds of millions of users and a loud platform on politics, immigration, and speech. He has co-founded five other companies, including tunneling venture The Boring Company and brain-implant maker Neuralink. The whole web has earned its own nickname, the “Muskonomy.”
That concentration of control feeds old worries about conflicts of interest and about tying a company’s fate to one person. SpaceX runs so much of low Earth orbit that the Pentagon has struggled to find a backup, a dependence that surfaced when Musk and the military clashed over how much the government should pay for satellite links on drones. Tesla has faced its own legal fights and shareholder pushback, much of it tied to Musk’s 2018 pay package, once worth $56 billion.
His politics have drawn the loudest fire. After bankrolling Donald Trump’s return to the White House and serving in the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, Musk became one of the president’s closest corporate allies. The two later fell out over policy and spending, traded public jabs, then cooled the feud. The fight landed as Tesla sales weakened in several markets in 2025, where protests and boycotts hit the carmaker.
Still, many investors weigh his record of turning wild ideas into valuable companies above his behavior. “Elon is the Edison of our time,” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said during a recent conversation with Musk. Dimon, once a courtroom opponent, told CNBC last year that the two had “hugged it out,” and called Musk “our Einstein.”
Written by Alius Noreika
