Source: Tencent Technology
By Su Yang
Edited by Xu Qingyang
On June 12 in the United States, SpaceX officially listed on Nasdaq, beginning trading simultaneously on the Nasdaq Global Select Market and the Nasdaq Texas Market under the ticker symbol “SPCX”.
Around 11:50 PM Beijing Time on June 12, SpaceX began trading at an opening price of $150 per share, up 11.11% from its offering price of $135, with a market capitalization of $1.97 trillion. After opening, the price briefly exceeded $160, pushing the market cap above $2 trillion, making it the sixth-largest company globally, behind NVIDIA, Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon.
The day before, SpaceX announced the issuance of 555.6 million shares at $135 per share, raising $75 billion—more than double the $29.4 billion raised by Saudi Aramco’s IPO in 2019, setting a new record for the largest IPO in history.
At the offering price, SpaceX's market capitalization is approximately $1.77 trillion; including employee stock options and restricted stock units, the fully diluted valuation approaches $1.8 trillion. The underwriters also have a 30-day overallotment option to purchase up to an additional 83.3 million shares, which, if exercised in full, would increase the total size of this offering to approximately $86 billion.
During the roadshow phase, market enthusiasm for SpaceX far exceeded expectations.
Investor demand exceeded $250 billion, resulting in nearly fourfold oversubscription; retail orders alone surpassed $100 billion, far exceeding the 20% allocation reserved for them.
On the other side of this capital bonanza is an unprecedented wave of collective wealth creation: more than 4,400 current and former employees have become millionaires through their ownership of company stock, with approximately 400 seeing their paper wealth exceed $100 million. From factory workers on the launchpad to core engineers, SpaceX has answered all the skepticism directed at this startup 12 years ago with this IPO.
But beyond the bullish market sentiment, controversy and division are equally sharp.
Renowned short-seller Jim Chanos publicly criticized this IPO as “a frenzy built on hope and dreams”; Morningstar assigned a fair value estimate of just $63 per share, more than 50% below the offering price, directly contradicting the market’s frenzy.
01 "We may still fail"
On the day of the stock listing, Elon Musk appeared at Nasdaq and delivered a brief speech.
“I initially estimated SpaceX’s chance of success at less than 10%,” he said in his speech. “I told people that even with good luck, we might still fail, but we had to try. If we don’t do it, and no new company enters the space industry, humanity will never become a true spacefaring civilization. Other aerospace companies have built decent rockets, but they’ve never truly pursued the technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary.”
He summarized SpaceX’s ultimate goal in one sentence: “Make Star Trek a reality, remove the ‘fantasy’ from ‘science fiction,’ and create an exciting future for everyone.”
“We want to take anyone who wants to go to the Moon, to Mars, to anywhere in the solar system, and someday perhaps beyond it. No matter who you are or where you’re watching from, SpaceX wants to take you to the Moon, to Mars, and ultimately even farther,” he said. “I am confident right now that with this team, we will make all of this happen for you.”
He added at the end: “There will always be problems on Earth that need to be solved, and we should address them. But there must also be things that excite you about the future, making you look forward to waking up each morning. That is the future SpaceX hopes to bring you.”
This speech provided an emotional anchor for SpaceX’s trillion-dollar valuation. In the upcoming roadshow, management must translate this grand narrative into language investors can quantify, using financial data and business logic.
Two types of buyers behind the $200 billion in orders
In this IPO, the participation of another group gave this capital bonanza characteristics distinct from typical institution-led listings. They didn’t rely on Morningstar’s valuation models or heed short-sellers’ warnings—they were betting on Musk himself.
In 2020, Musk posted: “I am a strong supporter of small retail investors.” At the time, he promised that SpaceX’s Starlink IPO would give retail investors “top priority.” Six years later, this promise was fulfilled with a 20% allocation.
As for the actual subscription strength from retail investors—orders exceeding $100 billion—this has already caught underwriters off guard during the roadshow, leaving the vast majority of individual investors' order requests unfulfilled.
Anna Watts, a 33-year-old PR manager in New York, is one of those who placed orders. She bought a few shares of Tesla two years after its 2010 IPO and witnessed Musk’s bet on electric vehicles propel him to the world’s richest person. This time, having tasted success, she even tried to borrow money or apply for a bank loan to buy SpaceX stock.
In her view: "The more you buy, the better. There’s no such thing as too much when investing in one of the most ambitious companies ever."
Craig Stephens, founder of the retail-focused IPO podcast "Access IPOs," observed that retail buyers are creating "extraordinary demand," a demand structure that may distinguish this IPO from trades driven solely by short-term price spikes.
Kim Forrest, Chief Investment Officer at Bokeh Capital Partners, commented: "This is likely the most promising IPO. Buyers want to be part of the future."
On the institutional side, SpaceX received approximately 1,000 institutional orders, with large institutions including sovereign wealth funds each allocated over $1 billion. The Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia and the Kuwait Investment Authority have placed substantial orders, and the Qatar Investment Authority may also make a significant commitment. International orders account for less than 10%, and Japan’s allocation has been increased from $2 billion to $2.5 billion.
Additionally, Ark Invest founder Cathie Wood’s bet is about to be tested. Her venture fund first invested when SpaceX was valued below $200 billion at the end of 2023 and continued to increase its position in 2025.
Cathie Wood referred to this IPO as a "once-in-a-lifetime investment opportunity" during her recent livestream.
Note that SpaceX’s IPO is also seen as a precursor to subsequent IPOs by Anthropic and OpenAI, with the three combined potentially adding $3.6 trillion in market value to U.S. exchanges.
Anthony Saglimbene, Chief Market Strategist at Ameriprise, said: "This is a big deal as a precursor to the listings of Anthropic and OpenAI. Even if we see more volatility, demand for AI remains very strong."
More than 400 employees have become billionaires.
At $135 per share, Musk’s holdings in SpaceX, including options, are valued at $688 billion. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, his net worth would increase by approximately $275 billion to around $970 billion, bringing him one step away from becoming a trillionaire.
The $275 billion increase stems from Musk’s existing substantial stake in SpaceX prior to the IPO, which was previously included in his net worth based on private market valuations; this listing transitions the valuation from the private market to a public market price of $135 per share, resulting in an approximate $275 billion increase in paper wealth.
In addition to Musk and early institutional investors, the most genuine beneficiaries of this capital bonanza also include current and former employees of SpaceX. SpaceX currently has approximately 22,000 employees.
According to analysis by the San Francisco investment platform Hill.com, more than 4,400 people will become millionaires in this IPO, with approximately 400 expected to acquire $100 million or more in wealth.
SpaceX stock certificate
Andrew Benson, founder of Hill.com, said: "For most IPOs, you typically only see the founders becoming billionaires. It's unusual for 400 people to reach the $100 million threshold. This shows that tremendous wealth is being created here."
At 37, former launch engineer Trevor Hayes declined a stable job at General Electric after graduating in 2011 to work full-time at SpaceX for 12 years, accumulating over 100,000 shares worth at least $13.5 million. Hayes now describes himself as semi-retired and has hired a financial planner while establishing a foundation to donate part of his wealth.
According to financial documents, SpaceX imposes restrictions on employees selling shares after the IPO.
Even if one becomes a millionaire on paper, it is not possible to immediately cash out all shares on the first day of listing. These lock-up provisions typically include a lock-up period, during which some employees must wait months or even years before their shares are fully released. This arrangement objectively prevents large-scale employee sell-offs and contributes to price stability.
04 Stories and Cards on the Pitching Table
Before the official listing of the stock, SpaceX's management conducted a crucial roadshow to present the company's growth narrative and attempt to justify its $1.77 trillion valuation.
SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell and Chief Financial Officer Brett Johnsen held a lunch meeting with approximately 300 institutional investors at Morgan Stanley’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters, hosted by Morgan Stanley Co-President Dan Sincovitz.
Elon Musk, who rarely participates in roadshows, also briefly appeared in some Zoom investor meetings.
During the roadshow, the Nasdaq Composite Index experienced its largest single-day decline in over a year, and Bitcoin retreated 37% from its January high. Some analysts speculate that one reason for the market correction is investors selling other assets to participate in this IPO. If this speculation holds true, SpaceX’s fundraising effect has surpassed the company itself, creating a suction effect on market capital flows.
Johnson summarized SpaceX's growth logic during the roadshow as a "flywheel," a synergistic system anchored by Starship launches and connecting Starlink, orbital computing, ground-based AI computing power, and in-house chip manufacturing.
Among these, the reusability of Falcon 9 has reduced industry costs by 85%, and Starship aims to improve cost efficiency by another tenfold. Starship V3 has a low Earth orbit payload capacity of 100 tons, with the fourth version expected to double this to 200 tons. This cost advantage directly translates into a competitive barrier for other businesses.
SpaceX CFO Brett Johnson
Starlink currently has over 9,600 satellites in orbit, accounting for 75% of all maneuverable satellites worldwide. SpaceX is transitioning from V2 satellites to V3, each with a capacity of approximately 1 Tbps, with 60 satellites per Starship launch enabling a 61 Tbps downlink capacity. According to Johnson, just 20 Starship launches would add 1.2 PB of annual transmission capacity to the Starlink network.
Once this scale is reached, Starlink will no longer be a backup option for remote areas, but a significant part of global internet traffic.
During the roadshow, SpaceX also emphasized the prospects of its AI business, claiming that its AI products face a $23 trillion market opportunity and highlighting that it is the only company capable of building AI computing power in space.
To demonstrate the feasibility of monetizing AI infrastructure, Johnson cited two recent partnerships: SpaceX signed an agreement with Anthropic allowing access to and hosting of models within SpaceX’s data centers; and it reached an agreement with Cursor to leverage its computing resources to enhance coding capabilities. “We are moving along the path to monetization,” he said.
05 The success rate is only 7%?
There is a fundamental divergence in the market's valuation of SpaceX.
CNBC host Jim Cramer warned ahead of the IPO that the greatest risk is not insufficient demand, but too many short-term speculators. “They might not even last through an afternoon—they just want to flip it as quickly as possible.” He believes the ideal allocation is to place shares in the hands of long-term holders.
Renowned short-seller and founder of Chanos & Company, Jim Chanos, called SpaceX “an IPO of hope and dreams.” “The space market is nearly limitless—you can fabricate any story you want—mars colonies, lunar factories, space data centers—to justify the valuation.”
Michael Burry, known for predicting the 2008 financial crisis, previously wrote: "Nothing in SpaceX's IPO filing suggests it is worth $1 trillion, let alone $2 trillion." He believes any post-IPO price increase would be "based on hype and technicals."
Ross Gerber, CEO of Gerber Kawasaki, who holds SpaceX stock, also questioned: “Investors are paying an extremely high premium for this stock.” The current valuation is more than four times higher than the $40 billion valuation from 13 months ago.
Morningstar's fair value estimate is only $63 per share, a 53% discount to the $135 offering price. Analyst Nicholas Owens constructed three scenarios:
Morningstar believes that only if Starship achieves rapid reusability and the orbital data center becomes commercially competitive will SpaceX's stock price approach its offering price.
Under the first scenario, Starship achieves an 85% reusability rate, and an orbital AI data center is successfully commercialized, resulting in a satellite constellation of approximately 59,000 satellites by 2035, delivering 11.6 gigawatts of AI computing power and annual revenue of $225 billion. Under this scenario, SpaceX’s share value is $154, 14% higher than the offering price.
Morningstar believes that, even so, the probability of this scenario occurring is only 7%.
The second scenario has a 50% probability of realization: a partially feasible orbital data center, forming a constellation of approximately 48,000 satellites by 2035, delivering 2.4 gigawatts of computing power and generating $47 billion in annual revenue.
Scenario three has a 43% probability: the Orbital Data Center becomes non-operational, and the company may abandon the project around 2028, similar to how Musk abandoned the plan to build multiple small factories at Tesla.
Morningstar wrote in its report: "At the $135 offering price, investors must pay an additional $72 per share in 'option premium' to gain the right to participate in a long list of potential future projects by SpaceX."
In other words, the premium the market is paying bets on the story Musk will tell next.
During a recent interview with JPMorgan, Musk summarized the reason for the IPO in one sentence: SpaceX is transitioning from a self-sufficient phase into a new growth cycle requiring massive capital investment.
SpaceX CEO Musk gives an exclusive interview
“We’ve been self-funding since around 2014 and 2015; the private funding rounds were essentially liquidity arrangements for employees and investors,” he explained. “But now it’s different. We’ll be deploying approximately 100,000 satellites into orbit, solely for communications.” The capabilities of these V3 satellites are 10 to 20 times greater than the current V2 models, and SpaceX’s chip design team has already completed tapeouts for three dedicated chips, delivering bandwidth 100 times higher than the existing Starlink system and halving latency.
Additionally, Musk explained the logic behind building space-based data centers—constructing power plants on Earth is becoming increasingly difficult to approve, while the solar energy available in space is one million times greater than what the global economy requires, yet still far below one millionth of the Sun’s total energy output. “We are entering a massive new growth phase, and for this, we need more capital.”
“We’ll know in two to three years whether Starship is reusable or if GPU racks in space are feasible. But the company expects everyone to decide by Friday whether it’s possible and how much it’s worth,” concluded interviewer Owens.
Investors who bought this stock at $135 are betting on Starlink’s cash flow, Falcon rocket launch orders, and a high-risk option—whether Starship can achieve timely reusability, whether orbital AI computing power can be commercialized, and whether the market will remain patient while waiting for answers.
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