Elon Musk Becomes First Trillionaire With SpaceX IPO: Company’s Stock Climbs Skyward in Biggest-Ever Public Offering

Elon Musk is officially the world’s first trillionaire after his SpaceX tech company debuted Friday at $150/share, 11% higher than the company’s IPO pricing.

SpaceX — rocket manufacturer, satellite internet service provider, AI firm and owner of X (aka Twitter) all rolled into one — had already officially set a record for the biggest IPO in history with its initial stock pricing. On Thursday it confirmed the pricing of its IPO of 555.6 million shares of its Class A common stock, at a public offering price of $135.00/share. That gave it a valuation of around $1.77 trillion and the company raised about $75 billion from the IPO.

Shares of the company, which is officially “Space Exploration Technologies Corp.,” began trading Friday at around 11:50 a.m. ET on the Nasdaq Global Select Market and Nasdaq Texas exchanges under the symbol “SPCX.” The stock shot up over $160/share, pushing its market cap over $2 trillion. Shares closed at $160.95/share after its first day of trading, closing up 19.2% from the IPO price and putting SpaceX’s current market cap at $2.11 trillion.

With the SpaceX IPO, Musk — already the world’s wealthiest individual — has captured trillionaire status. As of Thursday afternoon, Musk’s net worth stood at about $795 billion, accounting for his holdings in Tesla, SpaceX and other companies, according to Forbes. As of Friday, Musk’s net worth had popped to an estimated $1.1 trillion, per the New York Times.

Musk is founder, chairman, CEO and chief technical officer of SpaceX. Post-IPO, Musk’s voting control of SpaceX will be “north of 82%” but he is not permitted to sell shares in the company for one year, per CNBC.

Prior to SpaceX’s shares public debut, Musk in Texas helped “ring” Nasdaq’s opening bell Friday. “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 commented.

SpaceX’s debut in the public market comes ahead IPOs expected later this year for two AI heavyweights: Anthropic and OpenAI, both of which recently filed confidential paperwork with the SEC for initial public offerings of their own with dates for those IPOs yet to be announced.

The early surge for SpaceX’s IPO shows strong demand among investors to own a piece of the AI-fueled company. Still, some analysts have identified concerns with the tech conglomerate’s lofty valuation given its current financials.

In a June 8 report, research firm Morningstar put a fair-value estimate of $63/share on SpaceX (with a valuation in the neighbourhood of $830 billion). Even that assumes favourable outcomes of two unproven technologies: a rapidly reusable Starship upper stage and commercially scalable and competitive orbital AI data centres. “We expect neither of these technological questions to be answered before 2028, even in the most optimistic scenario,” Morningstar analysts led by Nicholas Owens wrote.

Meanwhile, whereas SpaceX claimed Starlink’s global addressable market was a whopping $1.6 trillion, Morningstar estimates it at less than 10% of that: $129 billion globally. The analysts project 7.5x revenue growth for Starlink to $85 billion by 2035, supported by “niche broadband, enterprise use cases, and carrier partnerships.”

SpaceX’s IPO valuation was substantially higher than previous high-profile tech IPOs — roughly 94 times revenue, the Morningstar analysts pointed out (compared with, for example, Meta at 22x and Amazon at 18x). The IPO valuation implied that the company’s 2035 earnings before interest and taxes would have to grow 75-fold from 2025 levels.

In 2025, the company’s xAI segment — which includes X — posted a $6.36 billion operating loss (vs. a $1.56 billion loss a year earlier) on $3.2 billion in revenue (up 22%). For the first three months of 2026, capital expenditures for the AI business came in at $7.7 billion. That represents a significant acceleration from $12.7 billion in capex for full-year 2025.

X, which is what Musk renamed Twitter after his debt-laden $44 billion deal for the social network, generated about $1.8 billion in ad revenue in 2025, per SpaceX’s IPO filing — less than half of the $4.5 billion in ad sales Twitter reported in 2021. As of the end of March, X had about 550 million monthly active users; of those, only 4.4 million were paying subscribers.