Elon Musk Becomes World's First Trillionaire As SpaceX Shares Surge 11% On Nasdaq Debut

Shares in SpaceX jumped 11% to $150 on their first day of trading Friday, marking the largest initial public offering in history and making Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire. The space and artificial intelligence conglomerate raised more than $75 billion in a blockbuster debut that propelled Musk's fortune far beyond any other billionaire.

Trading under the ticker symbol "SPCX" on the Nasdaq, the company priced more than 555 million shares at $135 each in a Thursday regulatory filing. This set an initial valuation of just under $1.8 trillion, AFP reported.

Friday's trading gains immediately lifted SpaceX's market value to around $2 trillion. The surge establishes the firm as one of the 10 most valuable companies in the U.S., placing it ahead of Tesla, Meta and Walmart.

The historic listing caps weeks of intense anticipation for the conglomerate and sets the stage for upcoming technology debuts. The offering details reveal massive investor demand alongside ambitious long-term financial and extraterrestrial goals.

Record Demand and Wealth

Investor appetite proved immense, with Bloomberg reporting the offering was oversubscribed more than four times. Options for nearly 83 million additional shares could ultimately push the total capital raised above $86 billion.

A high level of demand emerged among retail investors, who received 20% of the available shares. The historic IPO is expected to create several new billionaires and thousands of millionaires among the company's early backers and staff looking to capitalise on their equity.

To mark the occasion, a SpaceX neon sign reading "Building the infrastructure to the future" illuminated Times Square, while roughly 100 observers gathered outside the Nasdaq headquarters.

Musk "sets very futuristic goals that no one else is doing, and I think that has got a lot of people excited," Sarin Sio, of the financial firm Dovetail, told AFP.

Mars Ambitions and Financials

At a launch event surrounded by personnel in Starbase, Texas, Musk outlined the cosmic ambitions driving investor enthusiasm.

"SpaceX wants to be able to take you to the moon, take you to Mars, and ultimately beyond," Musk said to AFP. "I'm confident at this point that with the incredible team that we have here at SpaceX, we will do that for you," he told AFP.

Despite the soaring valuation, the company's financials present a mixed picture. SpaceX generated $18.7 billion in revenue in 2025 but recorded a net loss of $4.9 billion, largely driven by significant spending to build artificial intelligence capacity.

Wall Street's ongoing confidence relies heavily on Musk executing science-fiction-like promises, including establishing space-based data centres and landing humans on Mars with unproven technologies. The valuation also hinges on the rapid expansion of the Starlink satellite internet network and the commercial success of xAI, the maker of the Grok chatbot and Mr. Musk's rival to OpenAI and Anthropic that has yet to gain traction. 

Defying conventional forecasts, the SpaceX regulatory filing includes an extraordinary projection that the company could eventually capture more than $28.5 trillion in revenue across its target markets.

AI Rivals and Background

Musk co-founded the initial rocket enterprise in 2002 before expanding it into a dominant satellite operator. The business recently folded in his xAI division, which encompasses the social media platform X.

The successful debut positions SpaceX as the first major artificial intelligence giant to enter the public markets, arriving shortly after rivals OpenAI and Anthropic filed their initial regulatory documents.

The IPO occurs just over a year after Musk departed President Donald Trump's administration, where he led the controversial "DOGE" initiative aimed at aggressively cutting government expenditure while concurrently managing Tesla and SpaceX.

Musk's vocal support for Trump and right-wing populist movements in Europe, combined with a history of incendiary remarks on X, has seen the entrepreneur go from a broadly admired prodigy to a deeply polarising figure.