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It might have been SpaceX’s most ambitious launch yet.
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Shares of Elon Musk’s rocket company gained 19% Friday to close at $160.95 on the SpaceX’s first day of trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange. The largest initial public offering ever raised $75 billion for the company and made Musk the world’s first trillionaire.
The stock began the day trading at $150, and at one point shares surged over 30%, briefly giving SpaceX a market value of more than $2.25 trillion.
Friday’s offering made Wall Street history not just for its size, but also for its scope. SpaceX was the first of what are expected to be several major IPOs related to AI in the coming months. Anthropic and OpenAI are both readying public offerings.
Yet questions remain about just how profitable these companies will be on the bottom line, as they race to dominate what is already an expensive and increasingly competitive business.
Earlier in the day, Musk, SpaceX’s chairman, CEO and controlling shareholder, rang the Nasdaq’s opening bell from the company’s headquarters in Starbase, Texas, alongside hundreds of employees.
Other executives, employees and investors simultaneously joined the celebration on the floor of the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York, on which SpaceX shares will trade under the ticker symbol SPCX.
“I gave SpaceX a less than 10% chance of succeeding at all,” Musk said moments before the bell rang.
“Let me tell you, if people had told me this was gonna happen, I was like, man, you must be smoking some really good crack, because I think this company’s gonna fail,” he said.
Musk struck an optimistic tone Friday before trading opened, touting the company’s ambitions to push ahead in space exploration.
“We want to be able to take anyone who wants to go to the moon, anyone who wants to go to Mars, or anywhere in the solar system, and maybe beyond the solar system at some point” aboard a SpaceX rocket, Musk said. He said he was “confident” that the company “will do that.”
Musk founded SpaceX in 2002, when rocket launches were almost entirely dominated by major governments. Since then, the company, along with others, including Rocket Lab and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, have made major strides. NASA relies on SpaceX to get its astronauts and cargo to and from the space station, and the company is expected to play a key role in NASA’s return to the moon.
While SpaceX has historically made much of its money from launching spacecraft, cargo and other payloads for NASA, the U.S. military and commercial partners, the company has expanded in recent years into other businesses, most notably its Starlink satellite internet business.
Musk has also made some aggressive — some might say outlandish — predictions about the future of the company’s artificial intelligence efforts, including its own xAI business, which Musk also co-founded and was acquired by SpaceX in February.
The stock debut comes at a time when AI-fueled euphoria on Wall Street has never been higher. Despite a war with Iran that has stretched into a fourth month, major stock indexes continue to notch record highs, thanks primarily to shares of AI-linked companies.
Goldman Sachs President John Waldron said the SpaceX IPO is a sign that there’s an appetite to fund the artificial intelligence boom.
“It shows you that the capital markets — led by the U.S. capital markets, but the global capital markets — are demonstrating a willingness to finance this AI infrastructure build and this build in space,” he told Bloomberg Television in a Friday morning interview.
Goldman Sachs was the lead underwriter of the SpaceX offering, along with Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup. There are more than a dozen additional banks involved in the process.
Not everyone is convinced by the high valuation, though.
Analysts at Morningstar wrote this week that they believed the company was “overvalued” given its financials. SpaceX has yet to generate a profit, and it generated roughly $19 billion in revenue last year. “We value SpaceX at $780 billion,” the analysts wrote.
Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell dismissed skeptics in an interview on CNBC on Friday morning.
“Look at our track record, look at our history,” she said. “We do really difficult things.”
Shotwell also cautioned that SpaceX is operating more for the long term than for quarterly earnings reports.
What does SpaceX's stock market debut mean for you?
“I do not want to focus on quarterly earnings,” she said. “I’m not saying we’re not going to do right by our investors, but what folks who invest in SpaceX need to know is that what we’re doing is very futuristic.”
The IPO, which may also be viewed as a referendum on Musk himself, will be closely watched by those invested in the company — and those who are not.
Musk is a politically and socially divisive figure who uses the social media platform X, a SpaceX subsidiary, to promote a nativist, far-right agenda around the world.
SpaceX, in its IPO filing, said it planned to offer 30% of the IPO to everyday investors through retail brokerages such as Fidelity, Morgan Stanley’s E-Trade, Charles Schwab and SoFi.
“There are plenty of options being put in place for retail” investors, Waldron said. “I think you’ll see plenty of opportunities for retail to invest.”
It will also be a test of the markets themselves.
Waldron said that “many of us have been preparing for this for a long time,” including the Nasdaq stock exchange and the banks themselves.
“A lot of preparation has been put in place,” he added.
Steve Kopack is a senior reporter at NBC News covering business and the economy.
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