SpaceX made a blockbuster stock market debut on Friday, with its shares taking flight after the Elon Musk-controlled company completed the largest initial public offering in history.

SpaceX shares, which opened at $150 on Friday, closed at $160.95, up 19% from the IPO's $135 offer price. The stock peaked at $176.52 in intraday trading, a gain of nearly 31% from the offering price.

"Like most IPOs, the price jumped," Jay Ritter, an IPO expert and professor at the University of Florida's Warrington College of Business, told CBS News. "This is not a moonshot, but given the size of the deal, if the stock price holds, there will be more dollar value of [early stock returns] than any IPO in history."

Ritter said the opening price was "disappointing relative to what betting markets had been predicting," but still positive since trading was well above the initial offer price.

SpaceX is trading on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol SPCX.

SpaceX on Thursday priced its shares at $135, raising $75 billion to finance its ambitious plans, including establishing a human colony on Mars and deploying solar-powered data centers in space. 

"Whoever you are watching this, SpaceX wants to be able to take you to the moon, take you to Mars and ultimately beyond," Musk said Friday during an opening bell-ringing event at the company's headquarters in Starbase, Texas.

The offering leapfrogs SpaceX to become the largest global IPO, surpassing the current record holder, Saudi Aramco. When the state-owned Saudi Arabian oil company went public in 2019, it raised nearly $26 billion, according to Renaissance Capital.

SpaceX's IPO comes as the stock market continues to notch record highs, propelled by surging corporate profits and the artificial intelligence boom. SpaceX will eventually be joined by AI players OpenAI and Anthropic, which have both announced plans for their own IPOs.

Rockets, satellites and AI

SpaceX, which Elon Musk founded in 2002, develops and launches spacecraft for satellite operators, NASA, the Department of Defense and other customers. The business includes Starlink, a satellite division that provides broadband connectivity, and an artificial intelligence division focused on building data centers. 

SpaceX in February also acquired Musk's company xAI, which runs the social networking platform X and chatbot Grok.

SpaceX's public stock offering generated strong investor interest, with Bloomberg reporting on Thursday that the IPO received more than $100 billion in retail orders. 

SpaceX's strong Wall Street debut lifted its market value to $2.2 trillion, ranking it ahead of other major publicly listed players such as Meta Platforms, Samsung and Musk-owned Tesla. SpaceX still trails Nvidia, the world's most valuable company, which has a market cap of nearly $5 trillion, as well as a handful of other tech companies. 

Although SpaceX has a high valuation, it lags other tech giants in terms of revenue and profitability, Ritter said. SpaceX, which is unprofitable, booked $18.7 billion in revenue last year, far less than Alphabet's $400 billion in 2025 sales. Between the start of 2025 and March 31, 2026, SpaceX, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., lost $8.7 billion.

"Alphabet, Apple and Nvidia are producing annual after-tax profits of more than $100 billion a year," Ritter said prior to the IPO. "There's a long way to go to catch up with the profitability of those mega caps."

Indeed, SpaceX will face significant challenges in delivering on its bold plan to develop space for commercial ventures, including ringing the earth with AI-powered satellites, and to justify its massive valuation.

"I can see the argument for why this company should deserve a lower valuation," said Matthew Kennedy, a senior market strategist at Renaissance Capital, which tracks IPOs. "At the same time, it is true that some stocks are expensive and stay expensive."

Many experts expect SpaceX stock to be volatile in its early days of trading, as is common with other large IPOs. A Truist analysis of 30 sizable technology IPOs found that more than half the offerings posted negative returns a year after their shares started trading.

"The question on SpaceX is less about the immediate trading after IPO and more about how the price holds over the longer term," Samuel Kerr, global head of ECM at Mergermarket, a financial intelligence company for the M&A sector, said in an email before SpaceX stock started trading. 

The trillion-dollar man

SpaceX's IPO has turned Musk, already the world's richest person, into a trillionaire — at least on paper. He owns 4.8 billion shares, or about 42% of the company, as well as 350 million stock options, according to the IPO filing. With 82.4% of the company's voting power, he will continue to wield significant control over SpaceX's future.

SpaceX shares are expected to launch on several indexes, including the Nasdaq 100 and Russell indices, in the coming days. That could pave the way for more investors, including Americans with 401(k) plans, to become potential shareholders. 

SpaceX, which had filed for a confidential initial public offering in April, said that it sees a market opportunity of more than $28 trillion across the industries it operates in.

Of that, 90% is attributed to xAI alone, according to an analysis by Van Ha Trinh, financial markets analyst at the online broker Exness. That points to SpaceX's belief that its AI capabilities will fuel its growth.