A video shows Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, after the company’s IPO on the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York on June 12, 2026.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Shortly before the opening of the Nasdaq on Friday, Elon Musk stood in front of a happy crowd in the SpaceX company city in Texas. Its rocket maker was about to enter the public market with a valuation of around $2 trillion, instantly becoming the sixth most valuable U.S. company.
Musk, just weeks shy of his 55th birthday, told employees that when he started the company he gave it “less than a 10 percent chance of success.”
“If people had told me this was going to happen, I was like, man, you must be smoking some really good crack,” said Musk, who founded SpaceX in 2002 and now has 22,000 full-time employees. “Because I think this company is going to go bankrupt.”
Musk is now the world’s first billionaire after his company completed the largest IPO on record. raise $75 billionan amount roughly triple that of the second-largest U.S. offer, which was from Alibaba in 2014. There are 10 American companies worth at least $1 trillion. Musk leads two.
Whatever uncertainty Musk claimed to have felt when SpaceX took off, he showed none of it in the days leading up to the IPO. In a brief presentation, SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 and asked investors to take it or leave it. No price range was used to assess demand and no haggling with potential shareholders was used.
This is despite SpaceX making a fraction of the revenue of any tech mega-cap and racking up a loss of $4.9 billion last year, with total losses since its inception of more than $41 billion. After the stock closed Friday, SpaceX was worth $2.1 trillion, a multiple of 112 times last year’s revenue.
“This was not a deal that was priced based on market forces,” said Lloyd Greif, an investment banker at Greif & Co. in Los Angeles. “It was a deal based on what a man wanted. And when a man wants it, a man gets it, if that man is Elon Musk.”
Meanwhile, all these mentions of trillions and the billionaire have fueled talk of wealth disparity as consumers face crippling inflation driven largely by the war in Iran. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a self-described democratic socialist, wrote on social media, Musk’s new status is a “call to action to combat the unprecedented income and wealth inequality that currently exists.” And California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom written thewhich is owned by SpaceX, that “Americans are struggling to pay for groceries and gas while Elon Musk becomes a TRILLIONAIRE.”
Beyond the money, there are the problems with AI. Safe AI Now, a group of technological and religious leaders, established an inflatable effigy of a shirtless Musk in Times Square seeking to draw attention to the company’s poor track record on AI safety.
None of this dampened the mood on Wall Street, which was desperate for new deals after a historically slow period of IPOs dating back to late 2021. Closing the day up 19% and consistently holding well above the offering price, SpaceX’s IPO boosted confidence in potential deals later this year from AI model giants OpenAI and Anthropic, which are each valued at nearly $1 trillion in the private market.
Ancient Nasdaq CEO Robert Greifeld said he would “certainly bet” that OpenAI and Anthropic will go public in 2026. Both companies announced this month that they had confidentially filed IPO paperwork.
Making Facebook IPO Look SmallMore than 500 million SpaceX shares changed hands throughout the day Friday, a figure close to Facebook’s market debut in 2012, when about 580 million shares were traded. Facebook’s IPO then set a record, raising $16 billion. At the end of its first day of trading, Facebook was worth about $100 billion, or one-twentieth of SpaceX’s current market capitalization.
A big similarity between the two companies is that they are controlled by their founder. But even there, SpaceX is on another level. In the era of Facebook IPOCEO Mark Zuckerberg had the ability to control 56% of the voting rights. For Musk at SpaceX, that figure is over 82%.
Musk is certainly not the only one to benefit from a financial windfall thanks to SpaceX’s IPO.
The offer pushed The alphabet its stake surpassed the $100 billion mark, after the company invested about $900 million in SpaceX in 2015. Valor Equity Partners, led by Musk’s longtime friend Antonio Gracias, has a stake worth more than $80 billion, largely owned by the company’s customers.
In addition to institutional investors, the IPO would have been hit some 4,400 millionaires among current and former SpaceX employees.
Stock selling was led by Wall Street heavyweights Goldman Sachs And Morgan Stanleywith the help of Bank of America, Citi Group, JPMorgan Chase and a long list of other major banks and specialist companies. Subscribers were given access to additional shares, or their over-allotment of green shoes, on a colored condition.
“Only if bankers all wore green shoes,” wrote venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson, who invested in SpaceX in 2009, in a message on X. Jurvetson included a photo of green and white Nike sneakers decorated with the company logo.
Throughout the morning, some of Musk’s top investors and friends joined CNBC to talk about the historic event. Gracias was one of the guests.
The Valor founder and CEO said he met Musk more than 20 years ago through mutual friend David Sacks, a venture capitalist who until recently was That of President Donald Trump Czar of AI and cryptography. Gracias said he invested in Paypal “Previously,” when Musk and Sacks were part of the founding team and early investors in Tesla and SpaceX. In both cases, he said his company worked “on some tough problems to try to help these companies succeed.”
Gracias’ relationship with Musk extends beyond business. He spent time last year working with Musk on the Trump administration’s plan. DOGE efforts to reduce the federal workforce, regulations, and government spending. Gracias also served on the boards of Tesla and other Musk companies. As for SpaceX, Gracias said he plans to hold the shares “as long as possible.”
Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire, whose firm invested in SpaceX in 2019, called Musk a “generational entrepreneur,” comparing his planned delivery of the Starship launch vehicle to the introduction of railroads. He expressed confidence that the company could generate hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue in 2030.
Maguire said Sequoia would distribute some shares to investors “if we feel the valuation is way ahead of its skis,” but added that “as an individual, I’m going to hold my shares forever.”
“Heavily dependent on Starship”Skeptics of SpaceX’s high valuation have questioned the logic of it all. The company relies on its Star link satellite Internet service accounts for the bulk of its revenue and is the only profitable part of the business. But investors aren’t paying historically high sums for broadband service, no matter how good it is.
The space launch division is burning cash and counting on the Starship rocket to achieve much better economics than the Falcon fleet. And the AI unit, resulting from Musk’s xAI acquisition, is currently a money pit heading toward rental huge amounts of capacity to companies like Anthropic and Google.
Financial research firm CFRA awarded SpaceX a sales evaluation and a price target of $115, minutes after the company’s Nasdaq debut. Analysts said SpaceX has “high valuation expectations” and meeting them will require proving Starship’s viability, expanding Starlink, generating returns from AI infrastructure and ultimately producing consistent free cash flow.
“Our primary concern is that SpaceX’s long-term strategy remains heavily dependent on Starship,” CFRA analyst Keith Snyder wrote in a note to clients, saying the Starship rocket could pose a “bottleneck” for various SpaceX initiatives.
Then there’s SpaceX’s reported total addressable market of $28.5 trillion in space, connectivity and AI. This figure does not include other lunar projects like space tourism, asteroid mining or on-orbit manufacturing. This also does not include transport to Mars.
Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at New York University, told CNBC “Crying in the street” On Friday, seeing the addressable market figure provided by SpaceX made him think the prospectus was written by Grok, the xAI chatbot, rather than a banker.
“It’s a hallucination,” Damodaran said. “I would be embarrassed to even publish that figure.”
Maguire, a Musk permabull, said he stood by the projection.
“I would even say it’s an underestimate,” he said.
SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell celebrates with her family and other SpaceX employees at the Nasdaq Market site in New York following SpaceX’s IPO on June 12, 2026.
Spencer Platt | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Even though Musk is the face of SpaceX, getting to this point has a lot to do with the work of Gwynne Shotwell, the company’s chief operating officer and one of its first employees.
In a exclusive interview with CNBC ahead of the IPO, Shotwell responded to a question about whether his boss would ever combine SpaceX with Tesla. This is a potential deal that has been rumored for a long time, even more since Musk fled sioned SpaceX with xAI after having done the same with xAI and X.
Shotwell, whose stake in SpaceX is now worth more than $2 billion, did not rule out the possibility, but made it clear that it was not on his list of priorities.
“There’s no doubt that there are synergies between Tesla and SpaceX in our future,” Shotwell told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan at Starbase. “There’s a convergence of what we’re all trying to accomplish going forward, but right now I’m focused on keeping the lights on here, keeping the rockets in production, flying rockets, flying people, getting to the International Space Station and, critically, providing broadband to people who don’t have access to it.”
Musk, for his part, spent quite a bit of time Friday, seeming to savor the moment. As his company’s IPO dominated the news cycle, Musk was active on social media, primarily reposting messages, videos and photos of his supporters touting his company’s success. He didn’t write much, but he had a message to share about X.
“I love the incredible people at SpaceX beyond words” he wrote.
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