OFFBEAT

Retail investors lined up to get a handful of Musk's magic beans in SpaceX's debut

UPDATED SpaceX priced its blockbuster initial public offering at $135 a share on Friday, raising $75 billion and valuing Elon Musk's rocket biz at roughly $1.78 trillion. Retail investors piled in to get a handful of Musk's magic beans, sending shares up 19% on the first day, valuing the company at over $2.1 trillion, and turning the South African native into the world's first trillionaire based on his stakes in both SpaceX and Tesla.

The haul for the space exploration and satellite company could rise to about $86 billion if underwriters exercise their option to buy more stock, making it the largest IPO in US history.

The company confirmed [PDF] that 555.6 million shares of Class A common stock were sold in the offering, with another 83.3 million available to underwriters.

SpaceX is a loss-making company. In its Form S-1, filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, it divided operations into Space (Falcon 9 and the like), Connectivity (Starlink), and AI. Only the Connectivity segment is turning a profit, to the tune of $4.4 billion in 2025, while the others continue to rack up losses. Making a profit from AI continues to elude many companies – SpaceX is not the only entity where investment exceeds revenue, and Starship remains a work in progress.

In the company's Form S-1, SpaceX reported a net loss of $4.9 billion on revenue of $18.7 billion in 2025. The IPO values the company at more than 90 times that revenue.

According to The Financial Times, the IPO was heavily oversubscribed – orders exceeded the number of shares on offer by more than three times. Retail investors also ordered more than $100 billion of shares, and were allocated between 20 and 25 percent of the shares sold.

The record-breaking IPO reflects investor appetite for AI-related companies, as well as a bet that SpaceX's estimate of a $28.5 trillion total addressable market, including $22.7 trillion in "Enterprise Applications," proves realistic.

Skeptics may recall that promises and assurances associated with Elon Musk rarely survive contact with reality.

In addition to his trillion-dollar net worth, Musk may also be in line for a vast Tesla payout if the carmaker hits targets including a sharp rise in valuation and the delivery of a million robots over the next decade. ®