By Echo Wang
NEW YORK, June 11 (Reuters) – SpaceX on Thursday priced the biggest-ever U.S. initial public offering at $135 per share, making Elon Musk’s rocket and spacecraft manufacturer one of the world’s most valuable companies.
The IPO raised a record $75 billion on the sale of 555.56 million shares, valuing the space, satellite and AI provider at $1.77 trillion, a record for an initial offering. Reuters reported last week that the firm was setting the price at $135.
Thursday’s pricing caps off a months-long effort that realized Musk’s most ambitious project yet even as he stood a handful of financial traditions on their heads, and as some analysts question whether its lofty valuation is justified.
SpaceX will rank seventh among U.S.-listed firms when its shares begin trading on the Nasdaq on Friday, though it lost money last year and other mega-caps far outpace its revenue.
That values the company more highly than firms as varied as JPMorgan Chase, Berkshire Hathaway and Eli Lilly, as well as tech giants such as Meta Platforms and Musk’s own Tesla.
“The real test will be how the market digests the IPO over the next several weeks, not just one day,” said Adam Sarhan, chief executive of 50 Park Investments in New York. “The pricing came in just about right – not too hot, not too cold. Clearly retail investors are buying and, at this stage, they are a big component of this. We need to see follow-through after the first day of trading.”
The sale breaks the previous record for the largest-ever IPO held by state-run oil giant Saudi Aramco, which raised $25.6 billion on Riyadh’s exchange in December 2019, valuing it at $1.71 trillion. In inflation-adjusted terms, Aramco raised $33.2 billion for a $2.21 trillion value.
SpaceX’s $1.77 trillion valuation, based on 13.08 billion shares outstanding, could rise further should the underwriters exercise their right to sell additional shares, a decision typically made within 30 days after the offering. Reuters reported previously that SpaceX was seeking a $1.75 trillion valuation.
The company communicated the IPO price just after 3 p.m. EDT (1900 GMT), when its pricing meeting with bankers concluded and U.S. markets were still open, in a “free-writing prospectus” filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
SpaceX issued a press release half an hour later. Typically, the pricing meeting and the announcement of the IPO price take place after regular trading closes at 4 p.m., because securities issuers are wary of price-moving macroeconomic or news events affecting a share sale during regular trading.
The communication is the latest example of Musk executing the most ballyhooed Wall Street debut on his own terms. SpaceX set aside 30% of shares for retail buyers, an unusually large number, and decided on Thursday’s offering price before the roadshow that bankers and investors have long used to negotiate IPO terms.
“The SpaceX pricing is really in uncharted territory. I’ve never seen the price announced instead of the normal process of price discovery based on orders,” said Rick Meckler, partner at Cherry Lane Investments in New Vernon, New Jersey. “There’s such an emphasis on retail which is probably a little indifferent to the pricing.”
Musk also pushed, with mixed results, for early index inclusion that would create a broader base of buyers of SpaceX stock, and structured the company’s governance to preserve strong founder control. Musk will hold 82% of SpaceX’s voting power after the IPO.
The U.S. IPO market is set to rebound sharply this year after an earlier bout of volatility. Goldman Sachs has forecast proceeds could quadruple to a record $160 billion in 2026, driven by a pipeline that includes not just SpaceX, but also artificial intelligence companies OpenAI and Anthropic.
SPACEX REVENUE DEPENDS ON STARLINK
SpaceX said last week it has entered into a multiyear cloud services agreement with Alphabet’s Google, locking in computing capacity at a time of increasing competition.
Founded in 2002, SpaceX defines its mission as “to build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.” SpaceX said its market opportunity spans $28.5 trillion, a figure it called the largest in human history.
Its space operation is responsible for more than four-fifths of the mass launched into orbit over the past three years, it said, while its Starlink internet unit connects “millions of consumer, enterprise, and government customers across 164 countries, territories and other markets.” Starlink currently accounts for most of SpaceX’s revenue.
The lion’s share of its putative addressable market comes from xAI, which is widely viewed as an also-ran to OpenAI and Anthropic, though SpaceX says the combination of its AI computing infrastructure, its model and access to its real-time data on X “creates a significant strategic advantage.”
“The financial forecasts are uncertain, because of the reliance on large amounts of government contracts,” said Kim Forrest, chief investment officer at Bokeh Capital Partners in Pittsburgh. “People buying the stock are buying into the future and mankind escaping the Earth – not really investing in a company.”
The hurdles for the company at its enormous valuation include efforts by rivals such as Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin to accelerate the commercialization of space and pursue government contracts in a bid to unlock new markets beyond Earth.
Investors will get a chance to see the market reaction beginning on Friday, when the stock is expected by many analysts to open in the afternoon, given the size and complexity of the deal.
“Most IPOs pop in the 10-15% range, and this deal has a lot of hype, so I think anything less than a 10% return would be sort of disappointing,” said Matt Kennedy, senior strategist at Renaissance Capital, a provider of IPO-focused research and ETFs. “If it pops more than 50%, that tells me it’s trading on pure hype.”
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, BofA Securities, Citigroup and J.P. Morgan are joint book-running managers for the offering.
(Reporting by Echo Wang in New York; Additional reporting by Pritam Biswas in Bengaluru and Sinead Carew and Caroline Valetkevitch in New York; Editing by Colin Barr, David Gaffen and Matthew Lewis)
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