On Friday, SpaceX, the space company founded by Elon Musk, went public on the New York Stock Exchange. Not only is it one of the most anticipated listings ever, but it also comes with the largest initial public offering (IPO) in history. The IPO is the process by which a private company offers its shares to the public for the first time and lists on the stock exchange, allowing anyone to buy and sell them.
SpaceX had already raised $75 billion from investors by selling all available shares – 555.6 million – at $135 each, against demand that was four times higher. When the market opened, the share price had already risen to $150, and by the close it settled at $161, an increase of over 19% from the initial price. The company thus achieved a valuation of over $2 trillion, a figure that includes both new and existing shares. It started from a valuation of $1.77 trillion.
Bloomberg calculated that Elon Musk's net worth has now reached $1.05 trillion: it is the first time that a single person's wealth has exceeded one trillion dollars, which is roughly the GDP of Switzerland.
SpaceX shares debuted on the Nasdaq, the New York Stock Exchange index that includes all technology companies. Trading began at the opening of the U.S. stock market, at 3:30 PM Italian time, with the customary bell-ringing at Nasdaq headquarters by SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell and CFO Bret Johnsen. Simultaneously, Elon Musk and several of his colleagues gathered on a podium set up for the occasion in Texas, where the company is based.
From that moment on, the new SpaceX shares could be bought and sold on the stock exchange. As expected, due to high demand, the price rose during the first trading day, as did the overall valuation of the company.
SpaceX nevertheless said it had left another 83.3 million shares available reserved for banks and financial institutions. If they were to buy all of them, the company would raise another $86 billion, but the $75 billion raised so far is already more than double what the energy company Saudi Aramco raised in its 2019 IPO, which previously held the record for the largest initial public offering in history.
SpaceX builds the rockets that launch satellites into orbit, but over time it has expanded its activities to the communications and artificial intelligence sectors. Today it owns the world's largest satellite telecommunications network, Starlink, and is investing heavily in data centers and the computing power needed to develop artificial intelligences. Earlier this year, it merged with xAI, another company owned by Elon Musk that, among other things, controls the social network X, formerly Twitter.
The company's bet is that these three sectors – space, communications, and AI – are not separate markets but parts of the same infrastructure. Rockets are used to launch satellites, satellites provide connectivity from orbit, and connectivity makes it possible both to connect to the internet from anywhere on the planet and to run the data centers that power AIs.
The plan is very ambitious. Without a doubt, however, contributing to the great investor interest in the company is the combination of Elon Musk's presence – a figure with enormous financial resources, as well as being very influential in U.S. politics – and its artificial intelligence division, a technology that has attracted huge investments in recent years (so much so that it is often talked about as a bubble).
Net of these factors, there are some doubts about SpaceX's economic and financial sustainability.
Analysts' concerns are related to the ratio between what SpaceX could be worth on the stock market and what it actually earns. In 2025, the company had revenues of $18.7 billion, a huge figure, but very far from the valuation that, following the listing, has already exceeded $2 trillion. SpaceX closed 2025 with almost $5 billion in losses, and in the first three months of 2026 alone it accumulated another $4.3 billion. The company is spending heavily to develop Starship, its most powerful launch system, and to put thousands of satellites into orbit for Starlink.
In practice, by becoming shareholders, investors are not paying for the company's current results, which are currently only losses, but for those they expect it to achieve in the future. For every dollar of revenue produced today, the market attributes a value to SpaceX of about $95: this is the so-called price-to-sales ratio, and for SpaceX it is far higher than for other technology companies.
For many, this difference is consistent, given the great potential of Starship and Starlink. For critics, however, the ratio does not take into account the risks and successes that SpaceX has yet to prove it can achieve in the coming years.
