SpaceX IPO Shatters Records, Creates First Trillionaire

Since SpaceX's record-breaking IPO late last week, Elon Musk's second trillion-dollar company has been the talk of Wall Street. From Musk becoming the world's first trillionaire to SpaceX moving ahead with a $60 billion acquisition shortly after hitting the market, the first few days of trading have defied norms at every turn.

There are too many eyepopping numbers to count, but here are a few that stand out:

Historic volume

SpaceX saw record-smashing trading volumes in its first few days as a public company.

On Friday, its first day on the market, SpaceX saw $85 billion dollars worth of shares trade hands. Nearly $46 billion of shares traded on Monday, followed by almost $68 billion on Tuesday, averaging out to $66 billion in the first 3 days.

That's more trading than what took place in popular exchange-traded funds QQQ and SPY , which averaged $33 billion and $46 billion, respectively, over that stretch.

Meanwhile, Nvidia, the world's most-valuable company, saw dollar volume averages of around $27 billion, more than double Apple at $12 billion.

As for other tech IPOs, Cerebras recorded average dollar volumes of a little more than $6 billion in its first three days of trading. Facebook saw $23 billion worth of shares trade hands on its opening day and an average of $11 billion over its first three.

Funds raised in IPO

SpaceX initially raised $75 billion in its offering, making it more than twice the size of the biggest IPO ever before it.

Oil producer Saudi Aramco raised $25.6 billion in 2019, with that number increasing to $29.4 billion when underwriters exercised their so-called greenshoe option. And China's Alibaba reeled in a total of $25 billion, including the underwriter overallotment.

SpaceX's greenshoe allotment brought in a whopping $10.7 billion. That amount alone is greater than just about any tech IPO to date. Uber , for example, raised $8.1 billion in 2019, and chipmaker Cerebras raised $6.4 billion last month.

Facebook held the largest IPO for a U.S. tech company prior to SpaceX, raising a total of $18.4 billion, including the greenshoe option, in 2012. .

SpaceX staff wore green shoes on the trading floor Friday in a nod to the underwriters' option.

World's first trillionaire

SpaceX's IPO turned Musk into the world's first trillionaire. Musk owns about 46% of SpaceX's shares, a stake worth over $1 trillion, and retains voting control of around 82% of shares. Musk's Tesla stake is worth hundreds of billions of dollars more.

The next-wealthiest people in the world are Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, each worth close to $300 billion, according to Forbes. They're followed by several other tech founders — Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell, Oracle's Larry Ellison, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia's Jensen Huang.

Musk's fortunes don't sit well with everyone. Progressive politicians, including Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani used the occasion to remind the public of the vast wealth inequalities in the U.S. and the struggles average Americans face with today's rising inflation.

For some investors, the problem is SpaceX's governance. Anders Schelde, chief investment officer of Danish pension fund AkademikerPension, told CNBC that the fund wasn't buying SpaceX shares because "we cannot make the numbers work at the current valuation, and we believe its governance standards are very weak from a minority shareholder perspective."

Other groups have protested the SpaceX IPO, citing issues including Musk's politics and incendiary rhetoric, the company's poor track record with artificial intelligence safety, and environmental concerns tied to rocket launches and massive data centers.

Launching past Amazon

SpaceX shares skyrocketed out of the gate, quickly putting the company among the most valuable on the planet.

Its market cap climbed above Amazon's on Tuesday, closing at $2.66 trillion that day. SpaceX even briefly surpassed Microsoft, before slipping back below the software giant.

Fundamentals tell a very different story.

Amazon did 38 times more revenue than SpaceX last year, generating almost as much in sales every week as Musk's company pulled in all year.

Amazon's online ad business alone recorded almost as much revenue in the fourth quarter as SpaceX did all last year. Even Amazon's subscription services business is more than twice the size of SpaceX by revenue.

As for actually making money, Amazon's net income for the year of close to $78 billion was more than quadruple SpaceX's revenue. SpaceX is losing billions of dollars a year.

M&A

Within days of its IPO, SpaceX entered a formal agreement to acquire AI-coding startup Cursor for $60 billion in stock. The deal was first announced in April, but there was still a chance it wouldn't take place.

The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter, and marks one of the largest tech acquisitions on record.

SpaceX previously merged with xAI, Musk's AI company, in a deal that valued the combined entity at $1.25 trillion.

Excluding the SpaceX-xAI deal, there have only ever been three acquisitions above $60 billion involving a U.S. tech company as the buyer, according to FactSet.

The largest was Broadcom's $69 billion purchase of VMware in 2023, followed by Microsoft's purchase of Activision Blizzard for close to that amount the same year. The third biggest was Dell's purchase of EMC for about $67 billion in 2016.

Among the other tech megacaps, the biggest deals include Google's purchase of Wiz for $32 billion in 2025, Facebok's purchase of WhatsApp in 2014 for $19 billion and Amazon's acquisition of Whole Foods for $13.7 billion in 2017. In the waning days of 2025, Nvidia purchased assets from chip startup Groq for $20 billion.

As for Tesla, Musk's other public company, the biggest acquisition came in 2016, when the electric vehicle maker spent $2.6 billion on SolarCity, a solar installer that was founded and run Musk's cousins Peter and Lyndon Rive. Musk served as chairman and was its largest investor.

—CNBC's Robert Hum contributed to this report.

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