SpaceX IPO, and the World’s First Trillionaire
On the morning of June 12th, 2026, the Nasdaq bell rang and SpaceX officially became a publicly traded company under the ticker ‘SPCX’, closing the chapter on over two decades as a private venture. The company priced its IPO the night before at $135 per share, opening Friday morning at $150, an 11% jump right out of the gate. From there the stock ran. It hit a session high of $168.75 before pulling back a bit, then rebounded to a new high of $176.52, eventually closing down to $160.95, nearly 20% above the IPO price. Not a bad first day. The offering raised a record $75 billion, valuing the company at roughly $1.8 trillion, nearly tripling the previous record set by Saudi Aramco's $29 billion IPO back in 2019. SpaceX didn't just break the record, it made it look quaint.
The trading volume was something to behold. By mid-afternoon SpaceX had traded over 360 million shares, ten times the total first day volume of Cerebras, the second-largest IPO of the year. Dollar volume cleared $33 billion, outpacing the roughly $22 billion in QQQ and $18 billion in SPY volume on the same day. SpaceX was chasing Facebook's first day record of 580 million shares traded, and while it didn't quite get there, it put on a show Wall Street won't forget anytime soon. As of today, June 15th, SPCX is trading at $177.99, pushing the market cap to $2.33 trillion. The stock ran and hasn't looked back.
And then there's Elon Musk. You know? The world's richest person already by a wide margin. Well trades on SpaceX pushed him into territory no human has ever occupied. Per the updated IPO prospectus, Musk's stake in SpaceX alone is valued at over $866 billion, on top of his $350 billion-plus position in Tesla. Before the bell rang his net worth sat at an estimated $982.6 billion. By the time the dust settled it had crossed $1.1 trillion, making him the world's first trillionaire. It would take you 31,700 years if you said one number every single second, non-stop, without ever sleeping, eating, or taking a break. Another way to look at it, you could spend $27 million dollars per day, for 100 years, before you reached that amount. The man started SpaceX in a warehouse in El Segundo with the stated goal of making humanity multiplanetary. Twenty-four years later he rang the Nasdaq bell as the wealthiest person in recorded history. Whatever you think of him, that's a remarkable arc. The money raised will propel the Starship program into the future, allow SpaceX to build out the infrastructure to begin production of space based AI datacenters, and ultimately make life multiplanetary. Before the IPO, only a select few had a stake in SpaceX’s future, now we all can.
Credit: NASDAQ
