Shares of SpaceX rose 11% above their IPO price Friday in morning trading on the Nasdaq, as Elon Musk’s rocket company made its public debut.
The company sold 555 million shares at $135 and raised $75 million from institutional and retail investors in its initial public offering.
Shares, under the ticker SPCX, opened at $150 and rose to about $160 in early trades.
The company was valued at $1.77 trillion at its IPO price— immediately making it one of the 10 largest public companies. With an 11% jump in the price its market cap rose to nearly $2 trillion.
The morning rally catapulted Elon Musk into a trillionaire status — the first person to reach that once unheard of status.
“It is certainly hard to believe that a little company that started in a warehouse in El Segundo is now going public with the largest IPO ever,” Musk told cheering employees at the company’s Texas headquarters before the market opened.
SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell rang the opening bell on the Nasdaq, where crowds gathered outside.
With the shares in high demand, SpaceX could raise even more money. It has granted the nearly two dozen underwriters of the IPO ed by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley an additional 83 million shares to sell, which could raise its total take to $86 billion.
The IPO is easily the largest on record, surpassing the 2019 offering by Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil giant, which raised $29.4 billion.
Demand for the IPO shares was feverish on Wall Street despite concerns by critics that the company was overvalued at $135 a share and skepticism toward a governance structure that puts no constraints on Musk. He holds special shares with 10 times the voting power of common shares that put him in control of the company’s board.
The offering was reported to be oversubscribed four times over by big institutional investors. Blackrock, the New York money manager that is the world’s largest, was seeking to buy as much as $5 billion of the stock, Bloomberg reported.
Meanwhile, retail investors placed more than $100 billion in orders, far more than had been reserved for them, Bloomberg said. It was expected individual investors would have a 20% share of the offering, down from an earlier estimate of 30%.
Many of those retail buyers are devoted Musk fans and are assumed to want to hold the stock, but others were expected to flip the stock today to make a quick profit.
The money raised from the IPO will help fund the high ambitions Musk has for his diversified company, founded in El Segundo in 2002 and headquartered for many years in Hawthorne until a 2024 move to Texas.
However, SpaceX retains large operations in the South Bay city and blasts off its Falcon 9 rocket regularly from Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County.
The Falcon 9 accounted for more than 80% of the mass sent up into space last year, and now the company is developing the far larger Starship rocket, which NASA is relying on to send astronauts to the moon — with Musk eyeing Mars.
The rocket completed its 12th test flight last month and is seen as critical for reaching Musk’s other goals. They include building out SpaceX’s Starlink satellite broadband network and establishing a satellite-based mobile communications service. He also wants to launch solar-powered orbital data centers that would perform AI computations in space.
Musk merged his xAI artificial intelligence company into SpaceX this year, and one of the main draws of the IPO is his ambitions to become a leading AI company.
The merged company’s Grok large language model is seen as lagging competitors, but SpaceX has built two large terrestial data centers, which are are leasing computing power to rivals Anthropic and Google.
Musk also announced plans to build a massive semiconductor plant in Texas to make AI chips.
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