The initial public offering (IPO) of SpaceX, an American aerospace and artificial intelligence company founded by Elon Musk in 2002, occurred on June 12, 2026. It was the largest ever IPO, at a valuation of US$1.77 trillion. On the first trading day, the company reached a market capitalization of about $2.1 trillion, positioning SpaceX as the sixth most valuable U.S.-listed firm.

This valuation and the quantity of stock retained by Musk made him the first and only US dollar trillionaire, but were highly controversial. By late July 2026, SpaceX shares had fallen approximately 50% from their peak reached during the week after the IPO, causing Musk to lose his trillionaire status.

The IPO raised $86 billion for the company's long-term ambitions, including building orbital artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure to meet computing needs for xAI, a SpaceX subsidiary. The company chose to be listed on Nasdaq with the ticker symbol SPCX after securing a rule change allowing its early inclusion in the Nasdaq-100 index, but not the S&P 500 index.

History

After having rejected for many years taking SpaceX public, in December 2025 Elon Musk confirmed that SpaceX would be taken public at an unspecified date.

In February 2026, SpaceX acquired Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI at a valuation of $125 billion for xAI and $1 trillion for SpaceX, making the merged company the most valuable private company ever.

As of March 2026, the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq were competing for the IPO listing, and SpaceX requested early inclusion on the Nasdaq-100 index as a condition for listing on Nasdaq. On March 30, Nasdaq changed its rules to allow SpaceX and other large companies to be listed in the index 15 trading days after their IPO, instead of a minimum of three months and up to one year after. But because only 5% of SpaceX's shares would initially be available to the public, Nasdaq's float-adjustment rules gave SpaceX a weight of 1% in the index, versus 5% weight without the rule, initially mitigating any swings in the SpaceX stock price.

On April 30, S&P Global launched a public consultation relating to the treatment of megacap companies in its indices. It reaffirmed just prior to the listing that there would be no change to its rules which might have fast-tracked inclusion of SpaceX in the S&P 500 index. A press statement from the company announced: "Based on S&P DJI's Index Committee review of the markets and after consideration of responses received from a wide range of market participants, no changes will be made to the eligibility criteria including financial viability screens, seasoning period, or minimum IWF [Investable Weight Factor], for the S&P 500, S&P MidCap 400, or S&P SmallCap 600 … Accordingly, there will be no changes to existing methodology for this index family." Existing rules required a company to be profitable under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (US GAAP) in its most recent quarter as well as for the sum of its most recent four quarters. SpaceX's net loss of $4.94 billion in 2025 rendered it ineligible for inclusion. However, S&P Global said it planned to modify its rules to allow SpaceX earlier entry into its less widely followed but broader S&P Total Market Index and Dow Jones U.S. Total Stock Market Index. Index provider FTSE Russell also changed its rules to allow SpaceX to be included earlier in both the Russell U.S. Equity Indexes and the FTSE Global Equity Index Series.

On May 6, Anthropic signed a contract of $1.25 billion per month with xAI, a subsidiary of SpaceX, to buy all the compute capacity at the Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee, which has about 220,000 Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs). Wired noted the deal was key for SpaceX's IPO. SpaceX said in 2026 that their AI progress is driven by compute and used it as a key metric in the AI training of its supercomputer Colossus, which across multiple data centers has 1 million GPUs.

On May 15, SpaceX chose to list on Nasdaq.

On May 20, SpaceX filed its S-1 prospectus, declaring plans to list on a US stock market the following month. The document disclosed which parts of the business were generating profits as well as the future plans, including building data centers in space.

On June 5, Google signed a cloud computing agreement, similar to Anthropic's, to pay $920 million monthly for cloud compute capacity from Colossus, without specifying which data center. The deal covers a computing infrastructure of approximately 110,000 Nvidia GPUs, hardware needed to power Google Gemini models. Google will pay a reduced rate through September 2026 and the full rate until 2029.

The final IPO price was $135 on June 11. Trading began on June 12. After the IPO, Musk controls 42% of the shares, but 82% of the voting power due to his super-voting stock.

Share structure SpaceX is one of a number of large corporations with a two-class structure of its stock shares, consisting of Class A and Class B shares. Investors in the IPO purchased Class A shares, which have one vote each in company voting. Class B shares, held by company insiders, have 10 votes per share. Elon Musk owned more than 5.5 billion Class B shares, and controlled 82% of votes. Musk had also been promised 1.3 billion shares as an incentive to successfully lead a Mars colonization effort that lands one million people on Mars. However, Musk is currently permitted to vote with those shares in advance of achieving that goal. When sold to outsiders, Class B shares automatically convert to Class A and lose 90% of their voting power. Professors Lucian Bebchuk and Kobi Kastiel, the authors of a research article on "The Perils of Small-Minority Controllers", have commented that the share structure of SpaceX "provide[s] Musk with substantial value at the expense of public investors" and lead to inefficiencies and distorted incentives.

Previously held shares and shares purchased during the IPO were subject to restrictions on their sale, known as a lock-up period. Musk and other insiders agreed to not sell their shares for 366 days. Other pre-IPO investors had a 180-day lock-up, but also permission to share parts of their holdings sooner, after a series of benchmarks, including SpaceX's announcements of its quarterly results.

Bloomberg reported in June 2026 that, due to concerns related to critical technology export controls and regulatory risks, underwriters denied subscription orders from investors in Hong Kong and China. As a result, capital from both Hong Kong and China, including private banking clients, was barred from participating in the offering.

Valuation Prospectus valuation and underwriter metrics Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup and ⁠JPMorgan were named on June 2, 2026, as the joint underwriters for the offering, leading a syndicate of global investment banks underwriting the deal. Fees were to be less than 0.75% on the IPO, or about $500 million. Typically, fees are 4–7%.

In a move which Reuters qualified as "take-it-or-leave-it stock pricing", SpaceX's IPO price was set at $135 per share even before investor roadshows typically used by Wall Street to test demand ‌and set a price range.

SpaceX's $135 per share implied an enterprise valuation of $1.77 trillion. The prospectus relied heavily on a total addressable market (TAM) of $28.5 trillion—described as the largest in "human history"—of which roughly 90 percent ($25.6 trillion) was attributed to artificial intelligence through SpaceX's recently acquired xAI subsidiary.

The underwriters advanced revenue projections far exceeding independent estimates: Goldman Sachs privately projected $474 billion in total revenue by 2030 (versus $18.7 billion in 2025), while Morgan Stanley forecast $330 billion by 2030, and $3.4 trillion by 2040. SpaceX pointed to its compute contracts with Anthropic ($1.25 billion per month) and Google ($920 million per month) as evidence of AI revenue traction, with one analyst noting these added "$26 billion in annual run rate between the SEC [Security and Exchange Commission] filing date and the first trade". Both contracts, however, carried 90-day termination clauses. At the offering price, SpaceX traded at approximately 67 times trailing sales, roughly three times Nvidia's multiple at the time.

Analyst valuations and the overvaluation debate

Independent analysts converged on substantially lower valuations, with the AI-attributed TAM as the main point of contention. + SpaceX segment financials (2025–2026) Dimension Space Connectivity (Starlink) Artificial intelligence (xAI) Revenue $18.7 billion (Full year 2025) $4.1 billion (FY 2025). $11.4 bn (FY 2025); $3.26 bn (Q1 2026). $3.2 bn (FY 2025); $818bn (Q1 2026) Profitability -$4.94 billion (FY 2025); -$4.28 billion (Q1 2026) -$657 million (FY 2025); -$619 million (Q1 2026) +$4.4 bn (FY 2025) -$3.2 bn (FY 2025); -$2.5 billion (Q1 2026) Total addressable market (TAM) (overall $28.5 trillion) $370 billion (1.35%) $1,610 billion (5.65%) $26,510 billion (93.0%)

"Dean of valuation" Aswath Damodaran separately modelled each of the launch, Starlink, and xAI business segments to arrive at an enterprise value of approximately $1.3 trillion. Noting xAI's huge losses, he questioned its ability to achieve a significant share of the $26 trillion TAM as "beyond plausible". However, Damodaran acknowledged the stock would trade very heavily, based on mood and momentum".

Morningstar placed fair value at $780 billion. Analysts Nicolas Owens and Suryansh Sharma described SpaceX as "significantly overvalued", and that in particular xAI's lack of clear competitive advantage was a "material threat of value destruction". Their most optimistic valuation of $1.97 trillion was predicated on full Starship reusability and commercially viable orbital data centers, to which they assigned a 7% probability of achieving. Owens and Sharma predicted the share price would rise in the near-term given the small public float and unprecedented fast-track Nasdaq-100 inclusion, but advised long-term investors to await better opportunities further down the line.

A structural critique from Cape Fear Advisors argued that SpaceX's actual AI position, mapped against identifiable sub-markets, supported at most $200–500 billion valuation"approximately one to two percent of the $25.6 trillion AI TAM allocation the S-1 attests to". Cape Fear analysts noted that advertising-subsidized AI was structurally dominated by Google, that xAI's annualized revenue of roughly $500 million was a fraction of Anthropic's $30 billion and OpenAI's $25 billion in the enterprise market, and that SpaceX's strongest AI claim lay in defense and deployment, where its structural position was analogous to Palantir's in 2020.

Short-seller Jim Chanos described the offering as "very much a 'don't look at the man behind the curtain' situation", focusing on xAI's apparent pivot from developing frontier AI models to acting as a neoclouda provider of GPU compute for third partieswhich he characterized as "a commodity business valued far lower on the public markets". Hedge fund manager Michael Burry wrote on Substack that "nothing in that S-1 suggests it is worth $1 trillion let alone $2 trillion" and that any post-IPO gains would "be on hype and technicals".

Ross Gerber of Gerber Kawasaki, an existing SpaceX shareholder, described the IPO valuation as alarming given the company had been valued at $400 billion just thirteen months earlier. He attributed the extremely high price for this stock to confidence in Musk personally rather than conventional financial metrics.

Supporters countered that the Anthropic and Google contracts validated xAI's positioning, and that Starlinkthe only profitable segment, with quarterly revenue of $3.26 billion and subscribers projected to grow from 10 million to nearly 17 million during 2026provided a solid commercial foundation.

Market structure and retail investor exposure