SpaceX has cemented its place in corporate history following a blockbuster stock market debut that made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire. The aerospace company’s shares surged nearly 19% on the first day of trading on Nasdaq after completing a record-breaking $75 billion initial public offering (IPO), the largest ever in US market history.
Investor demand has remained strong since the listing. On June 15, SpaceX said underwriters had exercised the overallotment, or greenshoe, option to purchase an additional 83.3 million shares, increasing the total proceeds from the offering to $85.7 billion.
The move came as the stock continued to trade above its IPO price, pushing the company’s valuation past $2 trillion.
The listing dramatically increased the value of holdings owned by SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, venture capital firms such as Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, and Valor Equity Partners, along with university endowments and early employees who had invested in or received equity in SpaceX before the IPO.
“Seeing the company that I joined when it was just some sketches on paper become this valuable is almost surreal,” Tom Mueller, a founding SpaceX employee and current CEO of space tech company Impulse Space, told Reuters.
Australian mining billionaire Gina Rinehart became one of the largest external investors in SpaceX after her investment company Hancock Prospecting disclosed a stake worth more than $1 billion in the company’s IPO.
The Biggest IPO in History
SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 per share on June 11, selling 555.56 million shares and raising $75 billion. The offering valued the company at approximately $1.77 trillion at listing, surpassing the previous record set by Saudi Aramco’s IPO in 2019.
Looking back on SpaceX’s origins, Musk recalled the company’s humble beginnings. “It’s hard to believe that the little company that started in a warehouse in El Segundo is now going public with what was the largest IPO ever,” he said during the listing.
Musk admitted that such an outcome once seemed unimaginable, saying he had given SpaceX “less than a 10% chance of succeeding at all.”
“Elon deserves an extreme premium because of his track record and his vision for calling technology trends early,” Shaun Maguire, a Sequoia Capital partner who has led the firm’s $2 billion investment in SpaceX, told Reuters.
Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 as a vertically integrated aerospace company. The company designs, manufactures, and launches rockets and spacecraft, while also operating space-based communications networks. Its launch services business, led by the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rocket families, serves commercial customers, government agencies, and civil space programmes around the world.
As of March, the company had delivered approximately 7,400 metric tons of payload to orbit while maintaining a mission success rate of more than 99% across its Falcon rocket family. Since its founding, SpaceX has completed roughly 650 orbital launches, with more than 540 of those missions flown using previously used Falcon rockets.
The scale of SpaceX’s IPO makes it easy to forget just how close the company once came to bankruptcy.
By 2008, SpaceX had suffered three consecutive failures of its Falcon 1 rocket, burning through much of the capital Musk had invested in the venture. The company was running dangerously low on cash, and another failed launch could have pushed it into bankruptcy.
The turning point came on September 28, 2008, when Falcon 1 successfully reached orbit on its fourth attempt, becoming the first privately developed liquid-fuel rocket to do so. Seven years later, it made history again by successfully landing an orbital-class rocket back on Earth.
“I hope the folks that do decide to invest in SpaceX take a look at our history and see how we do operate and become comfortable with the way we operate,” Shotwell told CNBC.
SpaceX also operates Starlink, the world’s largest low-Earth-orbit broadband satellite network. Launched in 2019, Starlink has now grown to approximately 9,600 satellites, providing internet connectivity across dozens of countries and regions.
The company has further expanded into AI and data infrastructure following its acquisition of xAI in February. Through this move, SpaceX is building large-scale AI computing capabilities, including the Colossus data centres, while integrating AI services such as Grok into the Starlink ecosystem.
Moreover, to strengthen its control over critical hardware, SpaceX has partnered with Tesla and Intel on Terafab, a chip manufacturing initiative encompassing semiconductor design and production. The project intends to secure long-term access to advanced chips, improve computing performance, and reduce infrastructure costs.
Why Investors are Betting Big
While rockets remain SpaceX’s most visible business, investors are increasingly valuing the company as a combination of a launch provider, satellite operator, and AI infrastructure platform.
Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet division, has become a major revenue engine with millions of users worldwide.
Starlink generated $11.4 billion in revenue in 2025, accounting for 61% of SpaceX’s total revenue. Its operating profit reached $4.4 billion. By the first quarter of 2026, Starlink’s subscriber base had reached 10.3 million, more than doubling from 4.4 million a year earlier.
Despite its lofty valuation, SpaceX remains unprofitable. The company reported first-quarter revenue of $4.69 billion, up 15% from a year earlier, while full-year revenue rose 33% to $18.67 billion in 2025. SpaceX posted a net loss of $4.28 billion in the latest quarter and has accumulated a deficit of roughly $41.3 billion since its founding, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
However, Musk has projected that annual revenue could eventually reach $1 trillion by 2030.
Investors are also betting on SpaceX’s ambitious plans for AI infrastructure and space-based orbital data centres.
The company recently unveiled AI1, a first-generation orbital computing satellite that is designed to operate as a data centre in space. The spacecraft features a 70-metre wingspan and delivers up to 150 kilowatts of computing power.
In its IPO filing, the company estimated its total addressable market at approximately $28.5 trillion across space, connectivity, and AI.
SpaceX sees a $370 billion opportunity in space-based services, including launch and other space-enabled solutions. Its connectivity business, led by Starlink, targets a market worth roughly $1.6 trillion, spanning broadband internet, mobile connectivity, enterprise services, and government contracts.
The company believes it can offer various AI services, including AI infrastructure, consumer subscriptions, digital advertising, and enterprise software applications.
Mission Mars
While Starlink is expected to drive near-term revenue growth, Starship represents SpaceX’s long-term vision of extending human presence beyond Earth. It is a fully reusable rocket that can carry more than 100 tonnes of cargo to low-Earth orbit, making it the most powerful launch system ever developed for operational use.
NASA has already selected Starship as the Human Landing System for its Artemis programme, which aims to return astronauts to the Moon for the first time since the Apollo era. Future Artemis missions are expected to use Starship to transport crews from lunar orbit to the Moon’s surface.
For Musk, the Moon is only an intermediate destination. He has repeatedly described Mars as SpaceX’s ultimate objective, envisioning Starship as the vehicle that will carry the first humans to the Red Planet.
Musk’s long-term goal is to establish a self-sustaining settlement on Mars that could eventually grow into a city of up to one million people, making humanity a multi-planetary species.
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