SpaceX Begins Public Trading After $75B IPO

SpaceX sold 555.6 million shares at $135 apiece Thursday, raising $75 billion in the largest IPO on record.

The company is set to debut on the Nasdaq Friday under the ticker symbol SPCX , with early indications showing shares poised to open at $175, 30% higher than the IPO price.

The deal values SpaceX at $1.77 trillion, making it the seventh most-valuable U.S. company, ahead of Tesla , Musk's electric vehicle maker. The offering leapfrogs SpaceX past the current record holder, Saudi Aramco, which raised nearly $26 billion when it went public in 2019 , according to Renaissance Capital.

Can a Money-Losing Company Justify a Trillion-Dollar Valuation?

SpaceX reported revenue of $4.69 billion in the first quarter, up 15% from a year earlier, with full-year 2025 revenue jumping 33% to $18.67 billion. But the company remains deeply unprofitable. SpaceX recorded a net loss of $4.28 billion in the latest quarter after losing $4.94 billion in 2025.

The losses stem largely from massive capital spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure. Capital expenditures in the first quarter reached $10.1 billion, more than doubling from a year earlier, with $7.7 billion spent on AI and the rest on space and connectivity.

The company has racked up a cumulative deficit of around $41.3 billion since it was founded in 2002.

SpaceX's IPO filing recasts the company as a vertically integrated AI infrastructure platform spanning compute, networking, energy, and orbital systems , according to Data Center Knowledge. "The future of AI will be determined by the control of the physical stack," the company wrote in the filing, pushing SpaceX directly into the infrastructure race reshaping the data center industry.

Where the Energy Angle Gets Interesting

SpaceX's pitch to investors centers on an audacious plan: launch data centers into orbit where solar power is continuous and cooling is free. The company spent $12.7 billion on AI last year and $7.7 billion in the first quarter of this year alone, fueling Musk's ambition to launch data centers into space with free cooling and free energy from the sun, then beam signals back to Earth with its Starlink satellite network.

SpaceX revealed its first generation of orbital data center satellite — dubbed AI1 — in a video posted to X late Monday.

The AI1 satellite has compute capability of 150 kW peak and 120 kW on average, with the company quoting an efficiency of 70 kW per ton.

SpaceX announced a new 11-million-square-foot Gigasat factory in Bastrop, Texas, dedicated to building the infrastructure needed to achieve the company's orbital data center goal, with the facility expected to begin producing complete "AI satellites" by 2027 and targeting 1 gigawatt of orbital AI compute capacity by the end of next year.

The economics remain unproven. SpaceX's bet is that some AI demand can be pushed off-planet, where energy is abundant and cooling is a vacuum away, but whether the bet is sound depends less on whether SpaceX can build a 150-kilowatt satellite than on whether orbital compute can ever be cheaper than, or even competitive with, the ground.

How Musk Keeps Control Despite Going Public

Musk controls over 82% of voting power at SpaceX, giving him virtually complete control over the board.

Musk owns 4.8 billion shares of SpaceX, or about 42% of the company, as well as 350 million stock options, and with 82.4% of the company's voting power, he will continue to wield significant control over SpaceX's future , according to the IPO filing.

With the IPO, Musk is poised to be the world's first trillionaire, with his stake in SpaceX worth $866.5 billion, adding to his Tesla holdings valued at about $320 billion.

"For a lot of people looking at this deal, whether you want to buy it or not is in part a bet on Elon Musk," said Angelo Bochanis, an associate at Renaissance Capital, noting that Musk will retain a tight grip on the company by controlling the board and holding more than 80% of stock voting power.

Retail Investors Get Unusual Access

Unlike most major IPOs, SpaceX is expected to reserve an unusually large portion of shares for individual retail investors, targeting roughly 30% retail participation, compared with closer to 10% in a typical IPO.

SpaceX wants retail investors to receive roughly 30% of the shares being sold, which would amount to about $22.5 billion, and names Charles Schwab, Fidelity, Robinhood, SoFi and Morgan Stanley's E-Trade as some of the brokerage platforms that will make shares available.

The order book for the SpaceX IPO ran more than two times oversubscribed, with something like $150 billion in orders chasing a $75 billion raise.

What Changed This Week

SpaceX completed the largest initial public offering in history Thursday, pricing 555.6 million shares at $135 each and raising $75 billion at a $1.77 trillion valuation. The company begins trading Friday on the Nasdaq under ticker SPCX, with early indications suggesting a first-day pop of 30% or more. The offering dwarfs the previous record—Saudi Aramco's $26 billion raise in 2019—by nearly threefold.

The IPO filing revealed SpaceX's transformation from a rocket company into an AI infrastructure play, with the majority of recent capital spending directed toward orbital data centers rather than launch vehicles. First-quarter capital expenditures hit $10.1 billion, with $7.7 billion allocated to AI systems. The company remains unprofitable, posting a $4.28 billion net loss in Q1 2026 despite revenue growth of 15% year-over-year.

Elon Musk retains 82% voting control through a dual-class share structure, making him the world's first trillionaire on paper while maintaining near-total authority over strategic decisions. Retail investors received an unusually large allocation—roughly 30% of shares—more than triple the typical IPO retail slice.

What to Watch

While SpaceX's IPO is roughly three times the size of the largest U.S. IPO in history, it could be challenged by what's to come, as Anthropic and OpenAI, which are each valued at close to $1 trillion by private investors, have confidentially filed to go public, and those deals could happen this year.

SpaceX's first earnings report as a public company, expected in September according to TradingView, will provide the first detailed look at whether the company can narrow losses while scaling AI infrastructure spending. "Starship is a large capital expenditure program, and a war chest of this size means SpaceX can keep iterating at full speed without having to compromise," said Chad Anderson, founder and CEO of the investment firm Space Capital.

Watch whether the Gigasat factory in Bastrop, Texas, meets its 2027 production targets for AI satellites, and whether SpaceX can demonstrate that orbital data centers offer competitive economics against terrestrial alternatives. The company's ability to secure additional AI compute contracts beyond existing deals with Anthropic will signal whether the market believes in space-based infrastructure at scale.

Reporting based on coverage from CNBC, Reuters, NPR, NBC News, Scientific American, Data Center Knowledge, CBS News, CNN, June 11-12, 2026.