WASHINGTON — SpaceX shares rose on the first day of trading as the company went public in a milestone event for both the company and the broader space industry.
SpaceX sold nearly 555.6 million shares at $135 per share in an initial public offering June 12, raising $75 billion before expenses for the company. SpaceX did not change details about the IPO after disclosing the number of shares and pricing June 3.
SpaceX shares started trading on the Nasdaq exchange at about 11:45 a.m. Eastern June 12 at $150 per share. They closed at $160.95, an increase of 19.2% over the IPO price, giving SpaceX a market cap of about $2.1 trillion.
The IPO is the largest in stock market history, far surpassing the $29.4 billion raised by oil company Saudi Aramco when it went public in 2019. SpaceX has the option to sell an additional 83.3 million shares, raising $11.25 billion more for the company.
SpaceX first signaled an interest last December in going public after stating for years that it would remain privately held to focus on long-term ambitions such as human missions to Mars. Going public, the company said, would enable it to pursue new opportunities such as orbital data centers.
SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk has argued that data centers in space, launched by the company’s Starship vehicle, would be more cost-effective than terrestrial data centers in meeting demand from artificial intelligence applications. SpaceX has since proposed a constellation of 1 million data center satellites and merged with xAI, the AI company Musk also led.
In a May 20 prospectus for the IPO filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, SpaceX revealed it had $18.7 billion in revenue in 2025 but a net loss of $4.9 billion because of investments in both AI and Starship. The company had $4.7 billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2026 but a net loss of $4.3 billion.
“We intend to use the net proceeds from this offering to fund our growth strategy, including the expansion of our AI compute infrastructure, enhancements to our launch infrastructure and launch vehicles, increases in the scale and capacity of our satellite constellations, and any remaining amounts for general corporate purposes,” the company stated in the prospectus.
The IPO is an exclamation point on the rise of SpaceX, which Musk started in 2002 in California but which was dismissed by many in the space industry at the time. The company is now the dominant provider of launch services worldwide, and its Starlink broadband constellation has more than 10 million customers.
Even Musk thought the odds of success for SpaceX were long.
“I gave SpaceX less than a 10% chance of succeeding at all,” he said, recalling its founding in remarks from the company’s Starbase, Texas, facilities to celebrate the IPO. “I said, look, we’re probably going to fail, but we should give it a try, because if we don’t, if there’s not a new company that enters space, we will never be a truly spacefaring civilization.”
“It is certainly hard to believe that little company that started in a warehouse in El Segundo is now going public with the largest IPO ever,” he said.
Neither Musk nor SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell discussed future plans for SpaceX at IPO events, but Shotwell said in an interview with CNBC that the company would focus on Starship, Starlink and its AI initiatives.
“I wasn’t sure we would go public,” she said, because of a focus on long-term projects. “But we’ve gotten so many of the building blocks completed for so many of these different business areas, it actually feels like the right time now.”
“Our horizons are very long term. I do not want to focus on quarterly earnings,” she said. “I’m not saying we’re not going to do right by our investors, but what folks that invest in SpaceX, SpaceXAI, need to know is they need to know that what we’re doing is very futuristic and we should be thinking about the future as well as the current quarter.”
She did touch on some near-term milestones in the interview, including plans for the next Starship test flight. That will be another suborbital test flight, she confirmed, after some issues with the Flight 12 launch May 22.
“So we’ll improve that, we’ll fix that, learn that lesson, address it, get back to flight,” she said.
If that Flight 13 mission is successful, she said the company may attempt an orbital test flight on Flight 14, followed by its first Starship launch from Florida on Flight 15. She also said she expected the company to start launching its first Starlink V3 satellites on Starship later this year.
At an event at Nasdaq’s New York offices to mark the IPO, she noted that earlier in the morning the company conducted another Falcon 9 launch of Starlink satellites.
“I hope today is a day you feel great about and that you’re celebrating. Take a moment,” she told employees gathered at the event. “Now, the Falcon recovery team can’t take a moment today, but everybody else can, and I hope the Falcon recovery team can take a moment a little bit later.”
