Musk’s SpaceX Creates World’s Largest IPO: Historic Leap From 10% Success Rate to 2.1 Trillion Giant

TradingKey - This IPO frenzy has pushed the capital market's imagination to new heights.

On June 12, SpaceX ( SPCX) The moment the opening bell rang on the Nasdaq, it not only shattered global IPO fundraising records but also propelled Elon Musk to become the first person in human history with a net worth exceeding $1 trillion. Shares closed at $160.95 on the first day of trading, up nearly 20%, with its market capitalization firmly reaching $2.1 trillion, making it the sixth-largest company in the United States.

Ringing the opening bell at the Starbase headquarters in Texas, Musk admitted that when he founded the company over twenty years ago, he believed the probability of success was less than 10%. However, this IPO journey—regarded by outsiders as surreal—has tangibly reshaped the landscape of global technology and capital markets.

SpaceX IPO Day One: Greenshoe Option Takes Center Stage, 4,400 Join the Ranks of Millionaires

Bolstered by a massive wave of buying in the secondary market, SpaceX delivered an impressive performance on its first day of trading, closing up 19%.

Even more noteworthy was that the most eye-catching feature on the Nasdaq trading floor was not the ticker screens, but the green sneakers everywhere. The custom Nikes, personally proposed by Elon Musk, became the most viral visual symbol of this IPO, with each pair echoing the financial term "greenshoe option."

Wall Street bankers and traders darted between trading terminals in sneakers; this creative way of literally "wearing" a financial clause is likely something only Musk could have conceived.

Meanwhile, SpaceX's full-day trading volume surpassed 500 million shares, approaching the record of 580 million shares set by Facebook in 2012. However, the disparity in scale is what truly astounds—Zuckerberg's milestone IPO raised only $16 billion, with its first-day closing market cap barely touching the $100 billion mark. In contrast, SpaceX's closing market value is twenty times that amount.

Despite both being companies tightly controlled by their founders, Zuckerberg held 56% of the voting power when Facebook went public, while Musk has pushed that ratio above 82%, placing his level of control in an entirely different league.

The wealth spillover effect is equally staggering: Alphabet's $900 million investment in SpaceX in 2015 has now ballooned to a book value exceeding $100 billion.

What is more intriguing is that this IPO created approximately 4,400 millionaires overnight, all of whom are current or former SpaceX employees—a rarity even by Silicon Valley's wealth-creation standards.

Shaun Maguire of Sequoia Capital was lavish in his praise, directly comparing the significance of the Starship launch vehicle to the advent of the railroad. Although his firm did not enter until 2019, Maguire remains convinced that SpaceX can generate hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue by 2030.

Even if Sequoia distributes some shares to investors when it deems the valuation too high, his personal stance remains firm: "I will hold my shares forever."

Will SpaceX Join the New 'Magnificent Seven' Driven by 'Space + AI'?

Placed alongside SpaceX's financial reports, these figures do indeed create a surreal sense of contrast. Last year's total revenue was less than $19 billion, while net losses approached $5 billion, and cumulative cash burn over its twenty-plus-year history exceeded $410 billion. Yet, capital markets are willing to grant it a price-to-sales ratio of over 100 times, and its $75 billion fundraising target is triple that of Alibaba's IPO.

An investment banker noted pointedly that the pricing of this deal was not a result of market forces at all, but rather depended entirely on the will of one person—and when that person is Elon Musk, the market grants whatever price he asks for.

The narrative Musk's SpaceX is telling investors has long transcended mere rocket launches. The prospectus outlines a total addressable market of $28.5 trillion, with the AI-related portion accounting for $26.5 trillion.

Following the acquisition of xAI, the company has repositioned itself as a player in cloud computing and AI infrastructure, weaving its three business lines—orbital data centers, Starship launch vehicles, and Starlink satellite internet—into a grand "Space + AI" narrative.

Furthermore, as SpaceX officially lists, Wall Street has begun to redraw the U.S. market capitalization landscape. Several analysts believe the company should be included in the new generation of mega-cap stocks defining the market, alongside Nvidia ( NVDA ), Microsoft ( MSFT ), Amazon ( AMZN ), Google ( GOOGL ), Meta ( META ), joining the ranks of the 'New Magnificent Seven.'

Mastering Wall Street: The “Musk Tempo” of a SpaceX IPO

Looking back at the seven-month listing preparation period, top-tier Wall Street investment banks were effectively under the total control of Elon Musk.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, acting as lead underwriters, originally expected to follow a traditional script, but they never imagined they would spend the entire process reactively responding to the tech mogul's sudden whims.

From the initial market expectation of a Starlink spinoff to Musk's sudden decision to merge his $250 billion AI company, xAI, into SpaceX, and the unannounced roadshow disclosure of an option to acquire AI coding tool Cursor for $60 billion, the banking teams were forced to scrap their work several times, rewriting the prospectus and roadshow materials overnight.

In the pricing phase, SpaceX broke the standard IPO practice of price discovery, unilaterally setting a fixed offering price of $135 per share. This highly personalized "fixed-price" model not only significantly accelerated the process but also fulfilled Musk's long-standing promise of a "retail-first" philosophy—ultimately, retail investors secured approximately 20% of the allocation, with total orders exceeding $100 billion.

SpaceX Hit With “Sell” Rating as Trillion-Dollar Valuation Questioned?

But Wall Street is not all applause.

Just minutes after SpaceX’s Nasdaq debut, financial research firm CFRA issued a “Sell” rating on the company with a $115 price target.

Analyst Keith Snyder was blunt in his report, writing that the company’s entire long-term strategy hinges on Starship, and that this massive rocket, far from being a moat, could instead become a bottleneck that drags down the entire operation.

In his view, SpaceX’s valuation expectations are overstretched; to justify this price, the company must simultaneously achieve four goals: prove Starship's technical feasibility, continue scaling Starlink, generate real revenue from AI infrastructure, and ultimately deliver sustained positive free cash flow—should any link falter, the logical chain will collapse.

NYU Professor Aswath Damodaran, known as the “Dean of Valuation,” was even more scathing, stating that when he saw the $28.5 trillion market size forecast, he was “almost embarrassed to even mention the figure,” suggesting it looked more like a hallucination generated by an AI chatbot.

Breaking down these three business segments, the concerns of skeptics are not unfounded. Only Starlink is truly profitable, with revenue exceeding $11 billion and operating profit of $4.4 billion last year; however, as the service moves down-market, monthly revenue has already begun to trend lower.

Although the space launch division handles over 80% of the world's orbital payload, the development of Starship has been a bottomless pit, consuming all the profits generated by the launch business.

The AI segment is even more of a fog, having lost over $6.3 billion last year and burning nearly $2.5 billion in the first three months of this year; its current survival model involves leasing computing power to Anthropic and Google, essentially using external demand to bridge the gap for its own infrastructure costs.

Conclusion

From a success rate of less than 10% to a peak market capitalization of $2.1 trillion, Elon Musk has spent more than two decades hammering science-fiction scripts into reality.

He broke investment banking norms, reshaped IPO rules, and even led Wall Street elites to willingly don green sneakers to endorse him. Yet, the business world never believes in myths—it only believes in the ledger.

SpaceX’s future is destined to advance amidst a rift of extreme praise and intense skepticism. The emergence of a trillionaire may be just the beginning; the real show has only just begun.