SpaceX Stock Soars on IPO Debut, Valued Over $2 Trillion

SpaceX's newly listed stock leapt on its first day of trading on Friday, after an initial public offering that shattered records and made CEO Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire.

SpaceX stock, listed on the Nasdaq under the SPCX ticker, rose 19% on its first day of trading to close at $160.95. It became one of the world's biggest listed companies on its first day on the market, valued above $2 trillion.

The company raised some $75 billion selling more than 555 million shares at its offer price of $135, making it the biggest IPO in history.

To punctuate the big day, SpaceX launched a rocket in Florida about an hour before the stock market opened. It was the 650th flight of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, according to Spaceflight Now, delivering Starlink broadband satellites into orbit.

Musk was in Starbase, Texas, at the beggining of the day, behind what looked like a Nasdaq-branded podium, while a couple of SpaceX executives, including its President Gwynne Shotwell and Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen rang the opening bell in New York's Nasdaq Stock Market.

"Whoever you are watching this, SpaceX wants to be able to take you to the moon, take you to mars, and ultimately beyond," Musk said, noting it was hard to believe the company had just pulled off the biggest IPO ever.

"I gave SpaceX less than a 10% chance of succeeding at all, to be clear," he said of the company's early days. "In fact I told people this, I said 'look, we're probably going to fail, but you know we should give it a try because if we don't, if there's not a new company that enters space, we will never be a truly space-faring civilization."

SpaceX is not short of ambition for how it will use the money it raised through the IPO. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said it wants to expand its flagship rocket and satellite communications businesses, and is doubling down on a pivot toward artificial intelligence.

Earlier this year, it acquired Musk's AI startup xAI. SpaceX has plans to expand its data centers on Earth, develop AI microchips and launch what it calls "orbital AI compute infrastructure" — data centers in space.

At the center of it all is Musk, who has an iron grip on the company as chairman of the board and chief executive officer. Musk also holds roughly 85% of shareholder voting power.

The company is not profitable, though. Its IPO prospectus reported a net loss of $4.3 billion in the first quarter of this year, and critics have questioned its stratospheric valuation. Morningstar valued it at just $780 billion based on a discounted cash flow model, a widely used approach to assessing the value of companies.

Morningstar analysts Nicolas Owens and Suryansh Sharma wrote that uncertainty is "very high" when it comes to SpaceX's business, and its governance profile under Musk, who also runs Tesla and other companies, is complicated. "The company faces substantial risks related to strategic execution, technological evolution, market dynamics, regulations, AI buildout, and key-person dependency," they wrote earlier this month.

First of 3 massive IPOs expected this year

The SpaceX IPO is the first of three big tests of investor appetite for AI-related technology companies. OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, and Anthropic, creator of the Claude AI models, have both filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission signaling intent to list shares. Analysts say that could happen this fall.

All three companies are huge, and AI is taking the world by storm, but big question marks hang over future profitability. To date, they have been burning cash to develop artificial intelligence and subsidize usership.

Songyee Yoon, managing partner at Principal Venture Partners, a fund that focuses on AI, cautions that this is still a novel technology, and it's not clear yet which companies will turn out the most commercial and useful models.