SpaceX went public on June 12, 2026, and broke every record worth breaking. The company listed on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX, raising between $75 billion and $86 billion in what instantly became the largest IPO in history. The resulting valuation landed somewhere between $1.75 trillion and $2 trillion, a number so large it effectively made Elon Musk the world’s first USD trillionaire.
Four days later, SpaceX spent $60 billion of that freshly minted stock to buy AI coding startup Cursor. If you were wondering what the money was for, now you know.
The numbers behind the rocket-fueled debut
Shares were priced at $135 ahead of the listing. They opened at $150 and closed their first day near $160 to $161, a roughly 19% pop that would be impressive for a normal IPO. For one raising north of $75 billion, it borders on absurd.
The pre-IPO valuation had already reached approximately $1.25 trillion during SpaceX’s final private funding rounds. Post-IPO market cap estimates have ranged from $2.1 trillion to $2.5 trillion, putting SpaceX in the same conversation as Apple and Microsoft.
SpaceX reported 2025 revenue of roughly $18.67 billion, driven primarily by its Starlink satellite internet business. The company was actually posting losses, largely because of significant investments into AI infrastructure.
Musk retains voting control through a dual-class share structure, meaning public shareholders get economic exposure but not a meaningful say in strategic direction.
From rockets to robots: the AI pivot
The Cursor acquisition, completed on June 16, wasn’t SpaceX’s first move into artificial intelligence. It was its second major one in four months.
In February 2026, SpaceX finalized a merger with xAI, Musk’s AI venture behind the Grok family of models. That deal brought AI research talent, proprietary large language models, and data center capacity under the SpaceX umbrella.
Cursor, formally known as Anysphere, is a different kind of asset. The startup built one of the most popular AI-powered code editors in the developer world, competing directly with tools from Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot. The $60 billion all-stock deal values the company at a level that would have seemed hallucinatory even a year ago.
Together, the xAI merger and Cursor acquisition position SpaceX as a vertically integrated AI competitor. It now owns foundational models through Grok, developer tooling through Cursor, and the compute infrastructure to run both. The competitive targets are obvious: OpenAI and Anthropic, two companies that have collectively raised tens of billions in venture capital and strategic investment.
What this means for investors
The dual-class share structure is worth flagging as a risk factor. Musk having unilateral control over a $2 trillion company means strategic pivots can happen fast and without shareholder approval.
SpaceX generated $18.67 billion in revenue last year while running at a loss due to AI spending. Investors are currently paying a triple-digit revenue multiple for the stock. That valuation only makes sense if the AI investments generate returns on a massive scale, and if Starlink’s subscriber growth continues its upward trajectory.