SpaceX has made a spectacular debut on the stock market. Shares of Elon Musk’s space and satellite company, trading under the ticker SPCX on Nasdaq, temporarily reached a price of $175 on their first trading day on Friday. That is $40, or roughly 30 percent, above the offering price of $135 at which the shares were placed with institutional investors on Thursday evening.

Trading was volatile: the stock opened at $150, climbed to $162, and eventually hit its intraday high of $175. Based on that price, the company’s market capitalization currently stands at more than $2.2 trillion – at the offering price, SpaceX had been valued at around $1.8 trillion.

Sixth Most Valuable Company in the World

At this valuation, SpaceX instantly becomes the sixth most valuable company in the world, leaving heavyweights such as chipmaker TSMC, semiconductor giant Broadcom, and Saudi oil giant Saudi Aramco behind. Only Nvidia, Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon are currently worth more than SpaceX.

The listing is the largest IPO in Wall Street history: SpaceX sold 555.6 million shares, raising $75 billion. In parallel to its listing on Nasdaq in New York, the company is also dual-listed on Nasdaq Texas, which launched in March – a nod to its headquarters in Starbase, Texas.

Founded in 2002, the company generated $18.67 billion in revenue last year according to its IPO prospectus, driven primarily by the subscription model of its Starlink satellite internet service, which is available in 164 countries. Earlier this year, Musk’s AI venture was integrated into the group as SpaceX-AI, including the Colossus data centers and the Grok AI model. In the long term, SpaceX aims to build AI data centers in orbit. As a side effect, investors also gain exposure to one of the larger bitcoin holdings among publicly traded companies: as of the end of March, SpaceX held 18,712 bitcoin worth just under $1.2 billion.

Voices on the IPO

The opening bell was rung at two locations simultaneously: at the Nasdaq MarketSite in Times Square in New York and at SpaceX’s Starbase headquarters in Texas. COO Gwynne Shotwell celebrated the debut after 24 years as a private company at Times Square: “Today, we make history again — and we have a history of making history. We’re about 22,000 strong, and thanks go to all of you for hanging in there, for keeping a straight spine as the doubters doubt, to achieve historic things every day.”

Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman welcomed the company to the exchange: “As the home of innovation and the home of the innovation economy, Nasdaq is incredibly proud to be SpaceX’s partner as it builds the physical and digital infrastructure of the future. Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team, and we cannot wait to see what comes next.”

Elon Musk spoke from Starbase in Texas: “A little company that started in a warehouse in El Segundo is now going public with the largest IPO ever. There are always problems that we want to solve here on Earth, and we are solving them. But there also have to be things that get you excited about the future, that make you glad to wake up in the morning because you can’t wait to see what happens next. That’s the future that SpaceX wants to bring to you.” He added: “That’s what SpaceX is all about – to take the fiction out of science fiction.”

What Is an IPO Pop?

The sharp rise on the first trading day is a classic “IPO pop” – the phenomenon of a stock trading well above its offering price immediately after going public. On the one hand, a pop signals strong demand from investors who did not receive an allocation and are now buying on the open market. On the other hand, it also means the underwriting investment banks set the offering price too low: the difference between the offering price and the trading price – in SpaceX’s case, at times $40 per share – does not go to the company but to the initial subscribers. This is referred to as “money left on the table”: had SpaceX placed its shares at $175 instead of $135, the company would have raised roughly $22 billion more. Banks, however, often deliberately factor in a pop to give initial investors an incentive and to ensure a positive market debut.

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