There were a lot of ways that SpaceX’s initial public offering could have gone wrong. Instead, the company bucked Wall Street norms, pulled off the biggest IPO ever and raised $75 billion, according to a regulatory filing, while orchestrating a successful first day as a publicly traded company.
Everyone who needed to show up did. Citadel Securities, the largest retail wholesaler, said that SpaceX had the highest retail order activity it had ever seen for an IPO auction. Everyday investors put in more than $100 billion in orders for the company’s stock, according to Bloomberg. Several institutions ordered billions of dollars worth of shares. And the excitement didn’t stop once SpaceX (SPCX) shares finally started trading on the Nasdaq just before 12 p.m. Eastern time on Friday.
Robinhood (HOOD), which also helped some retail investors get access to the IPO, saw record-breaking traffic on Friday. More than 513 million SpaceX shares exchanged hands on Friday, according to Nasdaq (NDAQ).
The result: SpaceX’s stock opened at $150 per share, 11% above its IPO price of $135, and climbed as high as $176.52 per share. It ended the day at $161.33, reflecting a 19.3% jump from its IPO price.
That’s right in the sweet spot, according to experts – making investors money without the company leaving too much funding that it could have raised on the table. “An IPO is engineered to to reward the day-one buyers for taking the risk of a new issue,” said Michael Monaghan of Founder ETFs, who noted that his firm scooped up some SpaceX shares on Friday.
Trading on Friday sent SpaceX’s market capitalization to $2.11 trillion. That makes it one of the largest companies in the world and puts it solidly above major heavyweights like Tesla (TSLA), Broadcom (AVGO) and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TW:2330) (TSM), to name a few. Just a handful of public companies, including SpaceX investor Alphabet (GOOG) (GOOGL), are now worth more than SpaceX.
“I’m not sure that this could have gone much better as far as SpaceX is concerned,” Will Rhind, CEO of GraniteShares, told MarketWatch. His firm plans to launch both two-times long and short SpaceX exchange-traded funds on Monday, offering investors ways to either increase or hedge their exposure.
SpaceX also met the expectations of Samuel Kerr, global head of ECM at Mergermarket, who called Friday a “historic” day for capital markets. In emailed comments ahead of the market’s open, Kerr said that any immediate pop below 20% “would actually make me nervous,” due to the hype around the company.
See more: The big question facing SpaceX investors: What are you really buying?
Part of that is due to the high-profile nature of the IPO. SpaceX is a behemoth with few equals and dominates the rocket-launch industry. It also has a maturing satellite-communications business, as well as an early-stage artificial-intelligence component with multibillion-dollar deals supplying Alphabet and Anthropic.
Then there’s the so-called Elon effect. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is a “mastermind of financial engineering,” said Spencer Jackson, a former SpaceX engineer and the CEO of Critical Energy, a startup working on making clean energy more accessible. Jackson added that he’s learned to “never” bet against his old boss.
Musk has cultivated a massive fan base among retail and institutional investors alike with his ability to craft visions of a sci-fi future. His ambitions – from sending rocket ships to Mars to putting AI data centers in space – were a major draw. At its closing price, SpaceX is now trading at around 112 times its 2025 sales. Nvidia (NVDA), for example, trades at a price-to-sales multiple of nearly 20.
That’s why SpaceX, in an unprecedented move, offered a reported 20% of its shares to retail investors. Although that was less than expected, it’s still at least twice as much as individual investors could expect in any other IPO, according to experts.
“Elon’s fans in retail buy and hold. I’m sure a few people maybe didn’t, but in general, if you went [through] the work to get an allocation as retail, you want to own it for a very long time,” Monaghan told MarketWatch, pointing to Tesla’s returns since its own IPO.
Trillionaire
At SpaceX’s closing price and $2.11 trillion market cap, Musk’s stake in the company along with his other holdings, like his 10% ownership of Tesla, puts his net worth above $1 trillion. That makes him the world’s first trillionaire. He’ll also likely be the last trillionaire for a while, given that the second-richest individual is Google co-founder Larry Page, whose net worth is just $304 billion, per Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index.
But the trillionaire designation also makes Musk a target for politicians who argue that wealth disparities have become too great in America. Democratic politicians like Gavin Newsom, Elizabeth Warren and Zohran Mamdani took to social media on Friday to criticize Musk’s new stature. “Americans are struggling to pay for groceries and gas while Elon Musk becomes a TRILLIONAIRE,” Newsom posted. “The system is rigged.”
SpaceX will have some momentum as it starts life as a public company. Next week, it becomes eligible for speedy inclusion on a few major indexes, which will effectively force passive funds to buy its shares. The company could be eligible to be added to the Nasdaq-100 NDX after just 15 trading days, which would see it join fellow space firm Rocket Lab (RKLB) on the popular index.
“From the standpoint of the issuing company, there is a huge benefit, because suddenly there are a ton of people who are going to need to buy your stock,” Jeremy Bohne, a financial advisor at Paceline Wealth Management, recently told MarketWatch.
That should help mitigate trading volatility in the next few weeks to months, especially as SpaceX’s complicated lockup provisions allow some insiders to begin selling their shares. Jackson told MarketWatch that some SpaceX employees may sell their shares to make big purchases like buying a home, while others are likely to keep holding on to their shares.
Musk’s net worth could still rise higher. Both SpaceX and Tesla have massive stock- and performance-based compensation packages for their shared CEO. Tesla’s alone could be worth as much as $1 trillion if Musk meets all his targets, which include having 1 million robotaxis in operation.
His deal with SpaceX will likely be much tricker to pull off: It depends on the “establishment of a permanent human colony on Mars with at least 1 million inhabitants.” That, SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell optimistically predicted in a Friday interview with CNBC, could happen as soon as 2035 or 2040.
Still, some see these plans as bordering on science fiction. That, and the company’s high valuation and early index inclusion, is partly why some financial experts have said there are immediate risks facing SpaceX’s stock and that they would steer clear of it for a while.
In a bearish note to clients on Friday, CFRA analyst Keith Snyder said that the company’s valuation “appears to assume” that a number of speculative or early-stage ventures will successfully scale and generate attractive returns. “We view that as too aggressive,” he said, rating SpaceX at sell with a $115-per-share price target.
