SpaceX executives rang the opening bell at the Nasdaq stock exchange on Friday, launching the world’s biggest ever stock market flotation. The rocket ship maker, valued at $1.77tn after raising a record-breaking $75bn from investors, immediately set Elon Musk on course to become the world’s first trillionaire.
Musk’s net worth stood at $982.6bn after the IPO price, according to Forbes, meaning a small rise in the share price would push him over the trillion-dollar mark. The company sold shares at $135 each, an accept-it-or-leave-it price that stopped taking orders on Wednesday. Global brokerage Oppenheimer has already set a target of $190 a share.
“SpaceX's record $1.77tn IPO makes Elon Musk world's first trillionaire”
“It’s a huge roll of the dice,” said Sinead O’Sullivan, an economist who has worked at Nasa. “There’s so much built into one company, one share price here. Do I believe that Elon Musk is great at executing technological innovation? Yes. Do I believe that the share price is representative of the future value he’s going to create? Probably not.”
Despite the scepticism, retail investors are piling in. Peta Cooper, 43, a copywriter from Cornwall, plans to invest about £750. “It’s really exciting. I really love the space industry. They have had a really great track record so far with their launches and their innovation,” she said. She expects the share price to dip at some point but plans to “keep it in my portfolio and let it grow”.
The IPO comes after nearly two and a half decades as a private company. SpaceX is a conglomerate of Starlink, xAI, X and the rocket business, but it is not profitable: last year it pulled in $18.7bn in revenue while recording an operating loss of $4.3bn. For comparison, Meta generated more than $200bn in revenue with a net income upwards of $60bn.
SpaceX’s mission, stated in its investor prospectus, is “to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.” The Nasdaq has tweaked its rules to allow SpaceX to join the index on a fast-track basis, which Richard Hunter, head of markets at interactive investor, said “guarantees some additional and significant buying pressure” from tracker funds.
Musk, already the world’s richest person, first achieved a net worth of more than $500bn in October 2025. The South African-born entrepreneur, who dropped out of Stanford to found PayPal, has described this IPO as a means to obtain capital for space exploration. But the company’s lack of profitability and the sheer scale of the valuation have left some analysts questioning whether the share price truly reflects future value.