SpaceX begins trading on Nasdaq today under the ticker SPCX, pricing 555.6 million Class A shares at a fixed $135 to raise $75 billion at a $1.77 trillion valuation. It’s the largest IPO ever conducted, roughly double Saudi Aramco’s 2019 raise of $29–35 billion, and it values Elon Musk’s rocket company above Tesla, the other company he runs.

The book was 3.5 to 4 times oversubscribed, with total investor demand exceeding $250 billion against a 21-bank syndicate led by Goldman Sachs. Roughly 30% of shares were reserved for retail allocation through Robinhood, Fidelity, Charles Schwab, SoFi, and E*TRADE, triple the standard retail carve-out for a deal this size. That’s a deliberate signal: the Musk shareholder base is being recruited as a constituency, not just a funding source.

It’s also a conglomerate now. SpaceX merged with xAI in February 2026 in an all-stock arrangement CNBC valued at $1.25 trillion, absorbing X (formerly Twitter) in the process. In May, Musk announced xAI would be fully folded in and rebranded as SpaceXAI. The public company that opens today therefore operates three segments, launch, Starlink connectivity, and AI, under one ticker and one founder, who retains over 82% of the voting control.

The fundamentals are uneven. Starlink generated $11.4 billion in 2025 revenue at a 63% adjusted EBITDA margin with 10.3 million subscribers. The AI segment posted a $6.36 billion operating loss the same year. At $135, SPCX trades around 95 times 2025 revenue, and today’s market is paying roughly $500 billion more for the combined entity than the xAI deal implied four months ago.

Senator Elizabeth Warren asked the SEC to delay the offering over governance concerns. The deal priced anyway. Under Nasdaq’s fast-entry rules, SPCX could join the Nasdaq-100 within 15 trading days, triggering an estimated $7 billion in mandatory index-fund buying, which is to say the passive flows are already queued up behind the active bid.

The 2008 TARP era taught markets that scale plus political indispensability is its own asset class. SPCX is priced like the lesson took.

Sources