You can buy a piece of SpaceX today

Anyone with a pulse and a Robinhood account will be able to bet on Elon Musk’s aspirations to put factories on the moon. SpaceX is blasting off into public markets today, aiming to raise $75 billion at a valuation of $1.77 trillion, making it the biggest IPO ever.

The satellite, rocket, and AI company’s public debut will send waves across Wall Street and beyond, determining investors’ willingness to bankroll these cutting-edge industries and previewing how the planned blockbuster IPOs of OpenAI and Anthropic might fare.

Flying off the shelves

Investors lined up to buy the stock at its pre-set price of $135 like it was a TikTok-famous dessert. Buyers requested four times the available shares before trading even began, Bloomberg reported:

• An unusually large 20% of the shares were reserved for retail traders, who placed $100 billion worth of buy orders.
• The rest are getting gobbled up by institutional fund managers like BlackRock and sovereign wealth funds.

Meanwhile, the IPO is a cash-out bonanza for early investors, which includes venture capitalists, university endowments, and equity-holding early SpaceX employees—an estimated 4,400 of whom will become on-paper millionaires, according to investment platform Hill.com. It’ll also likely make Musk the world’s first trillionaire.

Is $135 worth it?

Investors buying SpaceX stock are accepting a price that’s nearly 100 times its revenue per share, much higher than is typical for AI, satellite, or rocket companies:

• Bulls are banking on Starlink dominating the satellite internet market, SpaceX launching data centers into space, and xAI’s models rivaling those of Anthropic and OpenAI.
• Skeptical analysts say the eye-popping valuation is justified only if the company reaches highly speculative milestones in a commercially viable way, noting that its steep expenses left it with a $4.3 billion loss in Q1 of this year.

Even if you don’t buy SpaceX…investors throwing their dollars at it could stymie the flow of cash toward shares of Tesla, as well as AI stocks like Meta and Alphabet.—SK