SpaceX made a historic stock market debut on Friday — surging past $2 trillion on Nasdaq and elevating Elon Musk to trillionaire status. The rocket company opened around midday at $150 a share and jumped nearly 20% as trading continued. SpaceX finished the day just below $161 with a market value of $2.1 trillion
Investors have jumped at the chance to get a piece of Musk’s sprawling empire spanning rockets, satellites and AI after the record-setting $75 billion IPO. According to a Reuters report, more than 510 million shares worth about $84 billion changed hands — even though SpaceX is currently unprofitable and generated only a fraction of the revenue brought in by similarly valued tech giants.
“I gave SpaceX less than a 10% chance of succeeding at all. To be clear, in fact, I told people this. I said, look, we’re probably going to fail, but you know, should give it a try, because if we don’t, if there’s not a new company that enters space, we will never be a truly space-bearing civilization,” Musk said on Friday.
World’s first trillionaire
Elon Musk has become the first and only trillionaire in the world following the SpaceX listing on Friday. According to the Forbes realtime billionaire’s list, he is now worth $1.1 trillion after gaining $61.2 billion within a single day.
SpaceX opened around midday at $150 a share, then rose to around $168, before finishing the day just below $161. That price gave the company a market value of $2.1 trillion, making it the sixth largest public US company. The figure is even higher than electric vehicle maker Tesla where Musk is also the CEO.
The trillionaire businessman recently told JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon that the company was going public to fund its ambitions of putting 100,000 satellites and data centers in space and eventually establishing a colony of people on Mars. He noted that deploying AI data centers in space is a “massive new growth base and you need capital for that”.
How does the IPO impact the company?
Betting on SpaceX is in many ways a bet on Musk himself. He holds 82% interest in a special B class of shares that gives him sweeping control over the company, even though his ownership stake is about half that. The unusual arrangement has drawn criticism from shareholder watchdogs.
His shares give Musk control over decisions related to the company’s strategy, finances and personnel. It also makes things so that the only person who can fire Elon Musk as CEO…is Elon Musk. SpaceX credits him as the “driving force” behind its growth, innovation and success. The company has repeatedly warned that the loss of Musk could disrupt its ability to execute its strategy as well as hurt its “reputation and relationships with customers, partners and other stakeholders.” It also contends that finding a replacement with the same skills and experience as the trillionaire would be time-consuming, if not nearly impossible.
SpaceX excluded from S&P 500 Index
SpaceX will not enter the S&P 500 or the Dow Jones Industrial Average for several months yet. Both have opted to stick with established and more traditional thresholds that do not allow SpaceX or other companies with gargantuan IPOs faster entry. That means even high-profile companies will still need to wait for their stocks to trade a full 12 months before they can enter the index.
Companies want to be in the S&P 500 in particular because it’s arguably the most important index on Wall Street, with trillions of dollars either mimicking it exactly or benchmarked against it.
Losses and the way forward
The rocket company has made a series of lofty promises in recent years — from establishing a one-million person Martian colony to ‘saving humanity’ by establishing other outposts in space. It also plans to launch data centers the size of football fields into orbit and outdo rivals Anthropic and OpenAI in the race to make money from artificial intelligence. But its goals require a significant influx of cash — billions more than it currently takes in from its rocket and satellite business. Data shows that Space Exploration Technologies Corp. lost $8.7 billion between the start of 2025 and March 31 this year.
“Whoever you are watching this, SpaceX wants to be able to take you to the moon, take you to Mars and ultimately beyond,” Musk said while joining a ceremonial opening bell ringing from Starbase.
What are the challenges for SpaceX?
According to an AP report, Wall Street bankers that helped take SpaceX public are also enthusiastic about the company — and the big fees they will earn — but not everyone thinks the stock price is justified. Analysts at research firm Morningstar, which doesn’t earn any investment banking fees, wrote that the IPO is “significantly overvalued.”
Citing SpaceX’s technology challenges, including shielding its orbiting datacenters from radiation damage and catching up to leaders in AI such as Anthropic and OpenAI, they estimated the company is only worth $780 billion — less than half its IPO value.
SpaceX itself has hinted at the challenges, conceding in regulatory documents that some of its business plans rest on “unproven technologies.” It also indicated that another part of the company, its artificial intelligence business called xAI, has no clear path to profitability and is burning cash to catch up with rivals.
