SpaceX Goes Public in the Largest Stock Offering in History

The rocket company raised $75 billion, and its shares rose 19 percent on the first day of trading to close worth about $2.1 trillion — instantly the sixth most valuable public company in America.

SpaceX began trading on the Nasdaq today and closed its first session at $160.95 a share, up 19 percent from the $135 price set last night. That values the company at roughly $2.1 trillion, making it the sixth most valuable publicly traded company in the United States on its first day of existence as one. The offering raised about $75 billion, the largest initial public offering ever conducted, by a wide margin.

The company being sold is not the one most people picture. SpaceX launches rockets, and the rockets are what made it famous — landing boosters upright, flying astronauts to the space station, the enormous Starship vehicle intended eventually for Mars. But the business that produces the revenue is Starlink, the constellation of thousands of small satellites providing internet service to places where cables do not reach: rural homes, ships, aircraft, disaster zones, and militaries. Rockets are the cost. Internet subscriptions are the income.

The listing matters to this site for a reason beyond the size of the number. The company has been moving steadily toward AI — announcing infrastructure plans built on Nvidia hardware, and talking publicly about putting data centers in orbit, where sunlight is constant and cooling is free. Whether that is a serious engineering program or an investor story is not yet clear. Being public means it will now have to answer the question quarterly.

For Elon Musk, who controls the company and already holds a Tesla pay package tied to a similarly implausible valuation, today converts a large paper fortune into a larger and more liquid one. For the market, the more interesting fact is the one a sale this size demonstrates: there is enough money looking for a home in space and AI to absorb $75 billion in a single afternoon.