SpaceX Tops $2 Trillion After 25% Pop in Record $75 Billion Nasdaq Debut

SpaceX shares jumped about 25 percent in their Nasdaq debut on Friday, June 12, pushing the rocket company's market value past $2.2 trillion after the largest initial public offering ever priced.

The stock, listed under the ticker SPCX, opened at $150, roughly 11 percent above its $135 offer price, and touched $176.52 at its session high before easing to about $169.36 in afternoon trading, according to CNBC. At that price the company is worth roughly $2.21 trillion.

The debut caps a $75 billion capital raise that dwarfs every listing before it. Saudi Aramco's $29.4 billion offering had held the global record for almost seven years; SpaceX more than doubled it. The first day of trading also made Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire on record.

"This was a successful launch, no doubt about it," said Jay Woods, chief market strategist at Freedom Capital Markets, in comments to CNBC.

"The public demand is there, so that's a good thing. But now we'll wait to see if it can hold that open price, or was it an euphoric retail crowd driving it."

Jay Woods, Freedom Capital Markets, to CNBC

SpaceX confirmed on Thursday that it had priced 555.6 million Class A shares at $135 each, valuing the company at about $1.78 trillion before trading began. Only around 3 to 4 percent of the shares are available for public trading, a thin float that tends to exaggerate early price moves in both directions.

Retail buyers ended up with 20 percent of the deal, less than the 30 percent SpaceX had earmarked, which included a 10 percent slice reserved for European investors. Options on SPCX are scheduled to start trading next week.

In a speech before the opening bell, Musk said the company's goal is to take the fiction out of science fiction.

His own fortune did much of the day's headline work. Forbes had valued Musk's pre-IPO stake, an estimated 42 percent of the company, at about $500 billion. At the IPO valuation those holdings are worth roughly $690 billion, a paper gain of nearly $190 billion. Thousands of SpaceX employees become millionaires alongside him.

The money came from somewhere. Shares of rival space companies sold off as investors rotated into the newcomer: Redwire fell more than 10 percent, Rocket Lab dropped more than 8 percent, and the Procure Space ETF lost more than 6 percent, CNBC reported. Tesla, the Musk company most widely held by small investors, swung between gains and losses.

For ordinary savers, the listing matters even if they never buy a share. Under a fast-entry rule Nasdaq introduced in May, a newly listed stock is ranked by market value on its seventh trading day and can join the Nasdaq-100 if it would sit among the index's top 40 members; SpaceX is already in the top 10. Analysts expect funds tracking the benchmark to be forced buyers of at least $7 billion of stock around inclusion, and FTSE Russell has made the shares eligible for its indexes under similar fast-track rules. The S&P 500 is the holdout: S&P Dow Jones Indices said in early June it will keep its 12-month seasoning requirement and profitability test, so SpaceX cannot join that index before mid-2027.

Retail appetite was visible all week. SpaceX was among the most-bought names by individual investors as trading opened, per VandaTrack data, and one of the most-discussed tickers on Reddit's WallStreetBets forum in the days before the deal, according to Breakout Point. "The folks who only got a portion of the shares they asked for are now looking for a stable market in which to buy," said Dan Alpert, founding managing partner of Westwood Capital.

Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX's operations chief, told CNBC she wasn't sure we would go public but that the current moment actually feels like the right time. The next tests arrive quickly: options trading within days, the index decision after the seventh session, and a queue of would-be followers. Anthropic and OpenAI have both filed IPO paperwork in recent weeks, and they will be watching whether SPCX holds its opening-day price.