The Rocket Has Landed: SpaceX's

There are days in financial history when the numbers stop feeling like numbers. When the sheer scale of what is happening demands you put down the spreadsheet and simply take stock of what the world has just witnessed. Friday was one of those days.

SpaceX shares closed at $160.95 on their Nasdaq debut, up nearly 20 per cent from the IPO price, giving the company a market capitalisation of approximately $2.1 trillion and placing it as the sixth-largest public company on the planet. More than $80 billion worth of shares changed hands in a single session. And in doing so, Elon Musk became something the world has never seen before: a trillionaire.

It is worth letting that word breathe for a moment. Not a billionaire. A trillionaire. Musk's 42 per cent stake in SpaceX is now worth more than $800 billion. Add his $280 billion holding in Tesla and his total personal wealth has crossed the $1 trillion mark, a figure roughly equivalent to a third of the entire market value of the UK's FTSE 100 index. The wealth of one man, comparable to the combined market capitalisation of Britain's largest publicly traded companies. Whatever your view of Musk the person, that is an extraordinary statement about the age we are living in.

Speaking from SpaceX's Starbase facility in Texas as he rang the Nasdaq's opening bell, Musk was, for once, disarmingly humble. "It's hard to believe that a little company that started in a warehouse in El Segundo is now going public in the largest IPO ever," he said. "If people had told me this was going to happen, I was like, man, you must be smoking some really good crack, because I think this company is going to fail."

It did not fail. It raised $75 billion in the largest initial public offering in Wall Street history, with orders coming in at more than three times the amount on offer. The figure could yet rise to $86 billion if the underwriters exercise their greenshoe option. For context, Saudi Aramco's landmark listing in 2019 raised $29.4 billion. That was considered a milestone. SpaceX has made it look modest.

A Market That Could Not Get Enough

The demand was, by any measure, extraordinary. Asset managers, sovereign wealth funds, hedge funds, and retail investors all scrambled for a piece of the offering. Individual investors alone placed orders exceeding $100 billion and were ultimately allocated between 20 and 25 per cent of the shares sold. Market-maker Citadel Securities noted record activity among individual investors in the IPO auction prior to the first trade. This was not just institutional money chasing the story. Ordinary people wanted in.

The investment banks that orchestrated the deal did not do badly for themselves either. More than 20 banks shared a fee pool of $500 million, with lead underwriters Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley each pocketing $100 million. That is, by some distance, the largest advisory windfall in the history of mergers and capital markets.

The AI Engine Behind the Valuation

To understand why investors were willing to pay such a premium, you need to look beyond the rockets. SpaceX is positioning itself, emphatically and ambitiously, as an artificial intelligence business. Its IPO prospectus claimed a total addressable market of $28.5 trillion. Goldman Sachs analysts predicted a 100-fold surge in AI revenues, rising to $322 billion by 2030. Morgan Stanley, meanwhile, forecast overall revenue growing 180-fold to $3.4 trillion by 2040, up from $18.7 billion last year. Earnings are projected to swing from a $4.9 billion loss in 2025 to $2.7 trillion in the same timeframe.

Those are projections that demand considerable faith. But then, SpaceX has a habit of making the improbable look routine.

The IPO proceeds are earmarked for a slate of projects that reads more like science fiction than a capital allocation plan: the continued development of the Starship rocket, a Mars colony intended to reach one million people, a lunar economy, and a network of orbital AI data centres capable of delivering enormous computing capacity. Musk stands to receive additional stock awards if SpaceX's valuation reaches $7.5 trillion, which should leave no one in any doubt about the direction of travel.

A portion of the proceeds will, however, be directed towards something considerably less glamorous. SpaceX is obliged to use a chunk of the funds raised to repay a $20 billion bridge loan taken out in March to cover debts associated with the merger of Musk's AI venture xAI and social media platform X. It remains the single most awkward element of the entire listing, a reminder that even the most celebrated IPO in history carries the untidy fingerprints of corporate complexity.

The Road Ahead

The warm reception on Wall Street has set a clear stage for what comes next. Both Anthropic, the Claude developer, and OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, are preparing their own listings, each expected to command trillion-dollar-plus valuations. The AI capital arms race is real, and the sums being deployed are staggering. Whether the market can sustain this pace of absorption is the question that will define the next twelve to eighteen months of technology investing.

In the near term, SpaceX stock will receive additional support as passive index-tracking funds linked to the Nasdaq, FTSE and MSCI benchmarks begin buying shares after the company was fast-tracked into those indices. That process will draw millions of ordinary savers and pension holders into Musk's orbit whether they choose to be there or not. It is, perhaps, the ultimate expression of how completely this story has moved from the edges of ambition to the centre of global finance.

A warehouse in El Segundo. A colony on Mars. And somewhere in between, the world's first trillionaire, standing in Texas, ringing a bell.