2.5 times more than Saudi’s Aramco: How big is SpaceX’s $75 billion IPO?

SpaceX priced the largest initial public offering in history on Thursday, selling 555.6 million shares at $135 each to raise $75 billion and valuing Elon Musk’s rocket, satellite and artificial intelligence company at $1.77 trillion. The stock begins trading on the Nasdaq on Friday under the ticker symbol SPCX.

The IPO sits far from anything that has come before. Here’s how:

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Put another way: the gap between the two — about $45.6 billion — is by itself larger than Aramco’s entire record-setting sale. And the deal could grow. SpaceX has given its underwriters an option to buy a further 83.3 million shares at the offer price, which would lift the total to about $86 billion if fully exercised, according to the company’s filing reported by news agency Bloomberg.

Demand ran well ahead of supply. The offering was more than four times oversubscribed, and Musk’s retail following placed more than $100 billion in orders — more than the entire deal on its own, and far above the roughly 20% of shares reserved for individual investors.

Pre-listing trading pointed in the same direction: derivatives offered by the brokerage IG International implied a first-day market value of $2.4 trillion, a jump of more than 35%, while traders on the prediction market Polymarket gave 70% odds that the stock would close its first day above $2 trillion.

That mark caps a steep climb. SpaceX was valued at about $800 billion in an insider share sale in December, roughly double its July 2025 level. Its acquisition of Musk’s xAI in February — which folded in the Grok chatbot and the social platform X, formerly Twitter — pushed the combined company to a private valuation of $1.25 trillion and the SpaceX business itself to $1 trillion. The IPO price now adds another leap in under a year.

It also stands to make Musk the richest person the world has seen. By Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, the offering lifts his fortune by about $275 billion to roughly $970 billion at the offer price — just short of the trillion-dollar mark, which a strong Friday debut could breach.

Forbes and Reuters, using their own valuations of his holdings, estimate his net worth at over $1.1 trillion once the shares begin trading, making him the first trillionaire.

The scale of that lead is hard to convey. “The second richest person has been hovering around $300 billion, so about less than one-third of what Musk can potentially be worth tomorrow,” Matt Durot, deputy editor at Forbes Wealth, told Reuters. “And only one other person, (Oracle founder) Larry Ellison, has ever been worth $400 billion.”

A key criticism is that much of SpaceX’s valuation rests on technology that does not yet exist or has not been tested at scale: data centres in orbit, factories on the Moon, a permanent settlement on Mars, and a large expansion of the Starlink satellite internet service. And xAI’s Grok, the company’s answer to OpenAI and Anthropic, has yet to gain traction with consumers.

That mismatch has drawn open scepticism. Veteran short-seller James Chanos called it “a hopes-and-dreams IPO”, driven by enthusiasm for Musk and AI rather than by the fundamentals of a company yet to turn a profit.

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“The total addressable market for space is infinite,” Chanos, founder of Chanos & Co., said at the iConnections Global Alts conference in New York, in remarks reported by Bloomberg. “You can build whatever stories you want — colonies on Mars, factories on the moon, data centres in space — to justify the valuation,” he added.

The company’s own projections are vast.

Bloomberg reported that SpaceX sees a $26.5 trillion total addressable market in AI; AFP reported that its filing claims it can eventually pull in more than $28.5 trillion in revenue across its markets.

Even the underwriters’ forecasts test belief. Analysts at Goldman Sachs reckon revenue could reach $474 billion by 2030, with the AI segment growing a hundredfold. Morgan Stanley analysts have reportedly modelled $3.4 trillion by 2040. “By almost any reasonable metric, that’s a bold assumption,” Ameriprise chief market strategist Anthony Saglimbene told Reuters of the Goldman figure.

There is a structural caution too.

Brad Badertscher, professor of accountancy at the University of Notre Dame in the US, wrote in a piece for The Conversation that the modern listing increasingly marks the point at which insiders and executives cash out rather than create value for public investors. The average company now goes public at nearly 10 years old, compared with 4 in the early 2000s, after much of the dramatic growth has already happened in private, Badertscher argued.

SpaceX has compounded that risk for newcomers: while Musk himself cannot sell for a year, the company waived the six-month lock-up that usually keeps employees from selling, McGeever noted, raising the prospect of insiders selling into retail demand.

“Much like Tesla, SpaceX is a bet on Elon Musk,” said Matt Kennedy, senior strategist at Renaissance Capital. “A market cap of $1.5 trillion-$2 trillion would certainly throw all traditional valuation methodologies out the window, and is instead best characterised as the ‘Elon Musk premium’.”

Investors have a name for the broader phenomenon — the “Muskonomy”, the web of businesses whose valuations move on faith in his vision as much as on the numbers.

That faith is meeting a market already primed for anything attached to AI. The Nasdaq-100 is up about 15% this year, even after a recent sell-off, and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index has surged more than 80% as money chases physical AI infrastructure.

SpaceX is the first of three blockbuster debuts expected to test that appetite: OpenAI and Anthropic are each expected to seek valuations above $1 trillion when they list, on top of an $85 billion equity raise from Alphabet. “It’s a big deal as a kind of precursor for Anthropic and OpenAI,” Saglimbene told Reuters.

The risk for the retail investors crowding in is that the pattern of hot tech IPOs is unkind.

Sam Grelck, equity strategy analyst at Truist Advisory Services, tracked 30 major tech-related listings over 15 years and found that every one fell by a double-digit percentage within a year of its first-day close — some by as much as 90%, with an average drawdown of 55%. “Investors should be prepared for elevated volatility and the potential for significant drawdowns when participating in new listings,” he warned.

Not everyone is bearish, and even sceptics acknowledge Musk’s record. Kim Forrest, chief investment officer at Bokeh Capital Partners, who says she does not buy IPOs, called this one “probably the most hopeful”.

Buyers “want to be part of the future”, she said. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, once a courtroom adversary of Musk’s, has called him “the Edison of our time”.

Robert Zubrin, the engineer and Mars Society president, told AFP, “SpaceX has accomplished a great deal that’s quite real. On the other hand, Musk frequently makes claims that are not real.” Whether the world’s most expensive IPO belongs in the first half of that sentence or the second is, for now, a question the market has priced at $1.77 trillion — and will start answering on Friday.