Elon Musk’s SpaceX has jumped at the start of trading to open valued at two trillion US dollars (£1.5 trillion) in a record-breaking stock market debut.
It makes Tesla and X owner Mr Musk – already a billionaire – the world’s first paper trillionaire and cements his position as the richest man on the planet.
The spaceflight and technology firm floated on the Nasdaq index in New York on Friday (12 June), with bosses at the firm ringing the bell to open trading for the day.
It opened at 150 US dollars (£111) per share, jumping 11% compared with its original float price. Shares continued to move steadily higher in the minutes after trading opened.
This would value Mr Musk’s stake in the business at around 765 billion US dollars (£570 billion).
It was nevertheless softer than predicted ahead of trading after early indications shares could have been priced as high as 175 US dollars (£130) – which would have marked a 29% increase.
On Friday, Mr Musk said in a speech from Starbase, Texas, that the record-breaking IPO was “hard to believe”.
He added: “If people had told me this was going to happen, I was like, ‘man, you must be smoking some really good crack, because I think this company is going to fail’.”
The entrepreneur promised to take humanity “to Mars and ultimately beyond” at the stock’s launch event.
SpaceX floated above the initial listing price of 135 dollars (£100.65) for shares, as filed to America’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
It was originally valued at 1.77 trillion (£1.3 trillion) dollars ahead of the start of trading, already making it the biggest ever initial public offering (IPO), eclipsing former record holder Saudi Aramco in 2019.
SpaceX raised 75 billion US dollars (£56 billion) ahead of the float on Friday.
AI giants OpenAI and Anthropic OpenAI have both revealed plans to float in recent weeks as the industry’s race to go public enters full swing.
SpaceX offered an unusually high proportion of shares in the float to smaller retail investors – thought to be 20% to 25% – alongside large institutional players.
Usually 5% to 10% of IPO shares go to retail investors.
In the UK, 2.7 million shares worth 364 million dollars (£271 million) were pre-allocated to British retail investors, according to the firm handling UK subscriptions.
It said total demand from UK retail investors stood at just under one billion dollars (£740 million), while total global demand from smaller investors was reportedly over 100 billion dollars (£74.5 billion), meaning many orders were unfulfilled.
Nearly two-thirds (61%) of British retail investors received a full allocation of shares, with those applying for up to 2,700 dollars’ worth (£2,013) getting the full amount, while those applying for more than this saw allocations scaled back, with a maximum allowed at 1,000 shares each.
The blockbuster equity raise will help SpaceX launch 100,000 next-generation Starlink satellites into orbit as part of aims to deploy AI data centres in space.
But much of the firm’s space business centres around its mammoth Starship rocket and its ability to be fully reusable and sturdy enough for a quick turnaround between flights.
Meanwhile, the IPO prospectus filed last week said the firm’s biggest potential market is the sale of business-oriented AI products, though there is uncertainty over the path to profitability for its xAI business, which merged with SpaceX earlier this year.
