Elon Musk has spent years telling anyone who would listen that SpaceX would be worth trillions someday. Last Friday, Wall Street officially agreed — and wrote a $75 billion check to prove it.

Rockets, Records, and a 19% First-Day Pop

SpaceX debuted on the Nasdaq under ticker SPCX on June 12, 2026, raising $75 billion at $135 per share — the largest initial public offering in history. The deal valued SpaceX at $1.77 trillion on pricing day, and retail investors were offered an unusually generous 30% allocation of shares, far above the 5-10% typical for major IPOs. Retail demand reportedly exceeded $100 billion in orders, with the deal running four times oversubscribed.

On its first day of trading, SPCX opened at $150, surged as high as $176.52, and closed at $161.11 — a 19.3% gain over the IPO price. That performance pushed the market cap above $2 trillion, vaulting SpaceX past Tesla to become the seventh most valuable U.S. company before the closing bell on Day One.

The Business Behind the Spectacle

This is not a story about hype alone. SpaceX operates the most-launched orbital rocket in history with Falcon 9, runs the Starlink satellite internet constellation serving millions of subscribers globally, and counts NASA and the Department of Defense among its anchor customers. The company has reused orbital boosters more than 300 times, fundamentally changing the economics of space access.

The IPO also lands at a remarkable moment for tech capital markets: Anthropic filed a confidential IPO in the same month, Alphabet announced plans to raise $80 billion in new stock sales for AI compute infrastructure, and the broader market appears to have developed a bottomless appetite for anything touching space or artificial intelligence. SpaceX manages to touch both.

The largest IPO in history belongs to a rocket company — which is either the most fitting thing that has happened in 2026, or a perfectly calibrated metaphor for where valuations currently live.

Source: CNBC