Labs

SpaceX prices $75B
IPO, opens at
$2 trillion, makes
Musk a trillionaire

SPCX closed up 19% in its Nasdaq debut on June 12, surpassing Saudi Aramco's 2019 listing as the largest IPO in history and folding xAI, Starlink and X into a single ticker.

By Casey Vanderhoof Frontier labs correspondent · June 12, 2026

SpaceX raised roughly $75 billion in its Nasdaq debut on June 12, pricing 555,555,555 Class A shares at $135 and closing the session at $161.11, up 19.34% and stamping the combined company with a $2 trillion market capitalization. The offering eclipses Saudi Aramco’s 2019 listing, which raised $29.4 billion, as the largest IPO in history. According to Reuters, Elon Musk became the world’s first paper trillionaire on his combined stakes in SPCX and Tesla.

The ticker itself tells the structural story. February’s all-stock combination with xAI folded Grok, the Colossus compute cluster, and the X social network into SpaceX, joining Starlink and the Space Launch business under three reporting segments: Space Launch, Connectivity, and AI. What priced today isn’t a rocket company. It’s a vertically integrated bet that orbital infrastructure, consumer connectivity, and frontier AI compute are one business with one capital structure.

Demand was the kind underwriters get to brag about for a decade. Bloomberg reports the book was 3.3 times oversubscribed, with total demand above $250 billion, retail orders above $100 billion, and a single BlackRock ticket above $5 billion. The Nasdaq opening auction printed near $150; the stock touched an intraday high of $175.50; volume passed 360 million shares by early afternoon, ten times the full first-day volume of Cerebras, 2026’s second-largest IPO. MSCI fast-tracked SPCX into its Standard and Large-Cap Indexes effective June 13, guaranteeing passive bid before most active managers have finished modeling the segments.

The prospectus, filed with the SEC the same morning, is less flattering on close reading. Consolidated 2025 revenue came in at $18.674 billion against a $2.589 billion operating loss. Cumulative losses since 2002 total $41.3 billion. Starlink contributed $11.4 billion in revenue, with 10.3 million subscribers across 164 countries as of Q1. The implied price-to-sales multiple at the $1.77 trillion pricing valuation isn’t one any sober analyst would defend on cash flows alone. It’s a vibes-and-monopoly-optionality multiple, and the market just cleared it 3.3 times over.

Governance is the part the index funds will eventually have to explain to their clients. After a five-for-one split effective May 4, Musk retains roughly 82.4% of voting power, making SPCX a controlled company in SEC parlance and a one-man capital allocator in practice. President and COO Gwynne Shotwell and CFO Bret Johnsen rang the opening bell at the Nasdaq MarketSite; Musk joined remotely from Texas, which is its own kind of signal.

The closest precedent isn’t Aramco. It’s the 1999 listings of holding companies whose multiples assumed every adjacent market would eventually be theirs. Aramco at least had oil.

Sources