SpaceX began trading on the Nasdaq on Friday, June 12, under the ticker symbol SPCX, in what is being called the largest initial public offering in history. Shares opened at $150 and climbed to $176.52 by midafternoon, pushing the company’s market capitalization above $2 trillion.
Chief Executive Elon Musk and President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell rang the opening bell. Musk appeared from Texas, while Shotwell was present at the Nasdaq in New York.
“I love the incredible people of SpaceX beyond words,” Musk wrote Friday afternoon on the social media platform X.
By 2 p.m. EDT, more than 360 million shares had changed hands. According to CNBC, more than 172 million shares are listed on the Nasdaq. Polymarket bettors estimated a 70% chance that SpaceX would close Friday with a market cap above $2 trillion. Only five other U.S. companies have reached that threshold: Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon.
Already a trillionaire, Musk is now CEO of two of the 10 most valuable publicly traded companies simultaneously.
Musk told CNBC before the IPO that SpaceX had been cash-flow positive since around 2015. He said he chose to take the company public to raise capital for what he described as “a significant growth phase.” Plans for that growth include deploying more than 100,000 satellites in orbit for communications and building artificial intelligence data centers in space.
Shotwell told CNBC that interest from ordinary investors helped drive the decision. “We’ve been feeling, over the last few years, a lot of pressure from everyday Americans and our friends that wanted to buy stock, and there was just no way for these folks to get in,” she said. She also noted that remaining private was important early on: “Having a private company was important to us early on because we weren’t really focused on quarterly financials, we were so focused on the long-term outlook for the company.”
According to its prospectus, SpaceX has recorded a cumulative loss of $41.3 billion since its founding in 2002. Originally created as a maker of reusable rockets, the only profitable part of the business has been the Starlink satellite internet service.
In February, SpaceX acquired Musk’s startup xAI, which has faced legal challenges this year over an application that can generate nude images of individuals without their consent. Several countries and individuals have sued to prevent the technology from operating.
Citadel Securities, which helps execute trade orders, processed more retail activity for SpaceX than for any other IPO auction on record, CNN reported the company said. Retail investors — individuals trading stocks rather than professionals — accounted for a significant share of the activity.