SpaceX priced its IPO on Thursday at $135 a share, pulling in $75 billion and setting the record for the largest public offering ever completed.
The Hawthorne company sold 555.6 million shares in the deal. At the offer price, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. carries a $1.77 trillion valuation — enough to rank it among the seven most valuable names trading on U.S. exchanges once SPCX opens on Nasdaq Friday morning.
Elon Musk built SpaceX into the dominant commercial launch provider and the operator of the world's largest satellite constellation. The IPO does not change that operating footprint. It changes the capital structure: for the first time, public shareholders will own a direct stake in the rockets, Starlink, and the Starship program that underpins both.
The Numbers That Matter
The $75 billion raise eclipses the previous IPO record by a wide margin. Saudi Aramco held the title after its December 2019 listing, which brought in $25.6 billion at a $1.71 trillion valuation. SpaceX cleared both figures in a single transaction.
At $135, the offering values SpaceX above several household-name megacaps that have traded publicly for years — including JPMorgan Chase, Berkshire Hathaway, Eli Lilly, Meta Platforms, and Musk's own Tesla. That comparison will draw scrutiny. SpaceX reported a loss in its most recent fiscal year, and its revenue base remains smaller than the banks and platforms it now surpasses on paper.
Investors are not buying trailing earnings. They are buying launch cadence, Starlink cash flow, Starship optionality, and Musk's track record of scaling businesses that looked overpriced long before they looked cheap.
What Happens Next
Pricing and trading are separate events. Thursday's $135 figure is the reference price for shares sold through the underwriting syndicate — Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Citigroup led the book. Retail and institutional buyers who received allocations at the offer will settle against that number.
Everyone else enters on the secondary market when SPCX begins trading. Mega-IPOs of this size rarely open at the offer. Nasdaq typically delays the first print until order flow stabilizes, which can push the opening cross well past the 9:30 a.m. ET bell.
Underwriters also hold a 15% greenshoe option. If aftermarket demand runs hot, the syndicate can sell additional shares at the offer price, potentially adding another $11.25 billion to the gross proceeds.
Context for the Record
A $75 billion IPO is not a normal data point — it is an outlier that resets how analysts talk about public-market capacity. The deal alone raised more capital than most S&P 500 companies are worth in total.
SpaceX enters public markets at a moment when commercial space spending is accelerating and Starlink has crossed into genuine infrastructure territory: residential broadband, maritime, aviation, and government contracts across dozens of countries. The prospectus laid out the risks — launch failures, regulatory friction, concentration around Musk's leadership — in detail. The market priced the offering anyway.
Friday's opening trade will answer a narrower question: whether $1.77 trillion was the ceiling or the floor.