SpaceX soars into world’s top five most valuable companies after IPO
SpaceX’s first public trades valued it at about $2.1 trillion, briefly putting Musk’s company ahead of Amazon and Meta Platforms.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX burst out of its public debut with a valuation that forced investors to rethink what, exactly, they were buying. The rocket maker priced its IPO at $135 a share, raised a record $75 billion by selling 555.56 million shares, and quickly climbed to a market value of roughly $2.1 trillion as trading began.
That price tag puts SpaceX in rare company. Even at its $1.75 trillion IPO valuation, the company would have ranked as the sixth-most valuable publicly listed U.S. firm before a single trade. By Tuesday, June 16, its shares had pushed it above Amazon, Meta Platforms, Broadcom and Tesla in market-cap rankings, turning the offering into more than a capital raise and into a referendum on Musk’s ability to sell investors a sprawling industrial future.
The first day on Nasdaq captured that split-screen reaction. Shares opened at $150, touched $176.52 and closed around $160.95, with more than 500 million shares changing hands. The debut drew cheers, jeers and protest in Times Square as Gwynne Shotwell rang the opening bell from Nasdaq in New York while Musk participated from Texas. Retail traders rushed in too, making SpaceX the most-bought stock on a net basis as online discussion accelerated around the listing.
What investors appear to be buying is not just a rocket company. SpaceX’s revenue engine is Starlink, which has more than 10 million subscribers and appears to underpin most of the business today. Falcon 9 also gives the company a harder industrial base to point to, with 165 launches completed in 2025, a record. Yet the prospectus also showed the scale of the burden behind the growth story: SpaceX has accumulated $41.3 billion in total losses since its founding in 2002, even as Musk says the company has been cash-flow positive since around 2015.
That mix of proven revenue and ambitious promises explains the stretched comparison with peers. SpaceX has no clean public-market analog because it blends launch services, satellite internet and long-dated bets on the next phase of the space economy. Musk has said the company plans to put more than 100,000 satellites into orbit, expand communications capacity and eventually build AI data centers in space. SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI in February 2026 widened that narrative further, folding Grok models, data centers and X into the broader Musk ecosystem.
The offering also marked a historic high-water mark for the market itself. Banks led by Goldman Sachs are expected to collect about $500 million in fees, and the IPO overtook Saudi Aramco’s $29.4 billion 2019 listing as the largest ever. For now, SpaceX’s ascent shows how far investors are willing to stretch to own a company that is part rocket maker, part satellite utility and part wager on Musk’s next impossible scale-up.
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