SpaceX rocks public market debut, stock pop drives new $2.1T valuation

SpaceX stock went live on the Nasdaq Exchange just before 10 a.m. MDT Friday morning, opening at $150 per share, 11% over its IPO pricing of $135 per share and popping to $160 in a matter of minutes, pushing the company’s market capitalization past the $2 trillion mark.

At the close of regular trading, SpaceX stock, trading under the SPCX ticker code, was trading around $161 per share after briefly breaching the $176 mark earlier in the day. SpaceX’s market capitalization of $2.11 trillion puts it in the number six spot of most valuable U.S.-listed companies. But it’s also now carrying the unfortunate distinction of being the only publicly held U.S. company worth over $1 trillion that lost money last year.

SpaceX, Elon Musk’s space vehicle manufacturing and launch business also includes the Starlink satellite internet service and network, artificial intelligence startup xAI, as well as the X social media platform, formerly Twitter, that xAI acquired in 2025.

SpaceX’s pre-IPO filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission reveal that while the company brought in $18.7 billion in revenues in 2025, up sharply from 2024, it still lost almost $5 billion last year. Among SpaceX’s various brands, only Starlink has recently shown a profit.

Making Star Trek a reality?

Musk joined SpaceX employees in Texas for a remote ceremonial ringing of the opening bell at the Nasdaq Exchange as company president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell rang the actual bell in New York marking the start of trading Friday morning.

“It is certainly hard to believe that a little company that started in a warehouse in El Segundo is now going public with the largest IPO ever,” Musk said.

Musk said he had little faith in the business prospects of SpaceX in its early days. He said he told people at the time that the company was likely to fail and gave it “less than a 10% chance of succeeding at all.” But he said he thought it was necessary for a private company to pursue a grander vision of space vehicles and space travel for humanity to have a shot at becoming a spacefaring civilization.

“While the other aerospace companies, they build good rockets and everything but they were simply not pursuing the technology that’s necessary to make life multi-planetary,” Musk said. “To make Star Trek … to make the exciting science fiction futures that we’ve read about, real. That is what SpaceX is all about. It’s to take the fiction out of science fiction."

Thanks to massive holdings in the now-public SpaceX as well as Tesla, which made its own public debut in 2010, Musk became the world’s first trillionaire on Friday, with a personal wealth accumulation totaling $1.2 trillion as of mid-afternoon according to real-time tracking by Forbes. And the next richest person in the world, Google co-founder Larry Page, isn’t even close with “just” $296 billion in individual wealth.

Friday’s SpaceX IPO raised around $75 billion in new capital for the company with underwriter options that could push the total raise to over $85 billion. Even without the boost from options, the SpaceX debut blew past the $29 billion that petroleum industry giant Saudi Aramco eventually raised after its 2019 offering.

Who controls SpaceX now?

For those who have tracked Musk’s modus operandi over the past decade or so, it will come as no surprise that the SpaceX CEO ended up with the lion’s share of available stock, and thus maintains a firm grip on dictating the direction of the company.

Musk controls 85% of SpaceX’s shareholder voting power with nearly 850 million Class A shares and 5.57 billion Class B shares, and no other person or entity has a larger stake than 5%, according to the company’s SEC filings.