SpaceX IPO makes Musk first trillionaire as AI potential drives $1.8 trillion valuation

SpaceX is now a public company valued for its AI potential, so what comes next?

Space Exploration Technologies, better known simply as SpaceX, became a publicly traded company on Friday nearly a quarter of a century after it was founded. The company began trading on the Nasdaq exchange in New York City at $135 a share, valuing SpaceX at nearly $1.8 trillion. By the end of the trading day the company's shares were selling at $160.95, a respectable increase of more than 19 percent. On paper, SpaceX founder Elon Musk became the world's first trillionaire, with his personal stake in the company valued at more than $700 billion. Because of the company's stock options plan, thousands of current and former employees became overnight millionaires. Employees at SpaceX have worked remarkably hard over the last 24 years, and now they will be richly compensated for having done so. SpaceX now stands as one of a handful of the most valuable companies in the world. Should it be? There is broad disagreement about whether SpaceX is fool's gold with its sky-high valuation, or represents a valuable opportunity to finally own a piece of a dominant space company that could some day command the business of data centers in orbit. SpaceX is now largely an AI company One thing is clear: SpaceX is now subject to significant public disclosures, and it will conduct much more of its business in the public eye. Although Musk retains complete autonomy in terms of ownership and voting rights, he will now be beholden to shareholders in a very important way: the price of his company's stock. Most shareholders bought SpaceX stock today not to be part of a the company's long-term plans to settle Mars, or to help NASA land humans on the Moon. Certainly, some space enthusiasts did. However, most people invest in stocks to make money. As SpaceX made clear in its S-1 document filed in May, however, the company's value does not lie in its "space-enabled solutions" or its Starlink internet constellation. As part of its "total addressable market," the company views these as comprising less than 7 percent of its value. Rather, Musk and SpaceX see the majority of its value in providing AI services, mostly from space, and primarily for enterprise applications. If investors agree that's where the vast majority of the company's profit lies, it is where they will want to see SpaceX put its time and resources. So as of today, SpaceX is owned by investors who largely want to see it make money; to reach its enormous valuation, it must make that money through orbital data centers. This is a sobering thought for NASA, which was the company's most important backer during its early years when bankruptcy was never too far away. Even a decade ago, a majority of the value of SpaceX's contracts were coming from NASA and other US government entities. Since then, however, revenues from Starlink have begun to significantly outstrip NASA's contracts, and this will likely become even more true in the future. How much of a priority is Artemis? NASA relies on SpaceX for so much right now: flying its astronauts and most important science payloads into space, and playing an important part in the Artemis campaign. But the $2.9 billion contract NASA signed with SpaceX in 2021 to build a Human Landing System for the Moon program is now regularly dwarfed by the AI compute contracts SpaceX is signing with companies like Anthropic and Google, which are worth tens of billions of dollars. For SpaceX, the money (at least in the near term) is in AI -- it is not in NASA government contracts. Yet NASA is desperate for SpaceX to begin delivering on critical milestones for the Artemis Program in the coming months and develop the capacity to land humans on the Moon. Key to all of the work for NASA is the massive Starship rocket, and how SpaceX will prioritize its further development. The large rocket appears to be close to reaching operational status, with the ability to put about 100 metric tons into low-Earth orbit. Assuming that happens in the coming months, how will SpaceX use its Starship launches? Will it spend its energies on preparing and launching a critical refueling demonstration in orbit, which will require back-to-back Starship launches? Will it fill up a lander prototype next year, which will mean a dozen or more tanker flights simply to enable an uncrewed lunar landing test for NASA? Or will the company focus on putting profit-making Starlink satellites into orbit, followed by critical tests of data center satellites? In short, will it follow the money? It's a valid question, because investors will be watching closely.

What the SpaceX I.P.O. Means for OpenAI and Anthropic

Mike Isaac covers Silicon Valley and regularly writes about artificial intelligence and finance. Wall Street celebrated the arrival of the largest initial public offering in its history with SpaceX on Friday. But after SpaceX's first day of trading ends, a pair of start-ups in San Francisco will be watching the share price of Elon Musk's rocket company closely. OpenAI and Anthropic, two of the leaders in artificial intelligence, have also announced their intentions to go public as soon as this year. While A.I. is only one component of SpaceX's business, how SpaceX fares among investors will be a crucial gauge of how the average person feels about investing in the public offerings of other A.I. companies that are believed to be far from profitable. Here are three things these companies are most likely considering: Is there a big appetite for big I.P.O.s? The market for I.P.O.s has been choppy for 10 years, as some of the highest-profile tech companies have been able to hold off going public for longer because of their seemingly endless ability to raise private capital. But SpaceX's debut may kick off a blockbuster year for tech companies heading to Wall Street. Anthropic and OpenAI will watch how SpaceX trades over the next few months to see if the markets are hungry for more shares of tech companies. The total value of SpaceX shares was inching toward $2 trillion on Friday, easily making it the biggest I.P.O. ever. But if OpenAI and Anthropic go public, they will not be far behind. Both are expected to be worth a little under $1 trillion. Bankers always find it difficult to time an I.P.O. "correctly," especially lately, given instability in the global economy. But SpaceX's pop on Day 1 could offer hope that there is plenty of investment interest to go around. Are people worried about profits? Everyday investors were willing to stomach money-losing tech companies in previous booms -- until they weren't. The dot-com boom of the 1990s was followed by a brutal bust for tech stocks. A similar pattern followed another generation of tech companies that went public more than a decade later. By 2019, Wall Street was turning away from companies with balance sheets awash in red ink. That year, when Uber, which would not turn an operating profit until 2023, went public, its stock market debut lost more in dollar terms than any other American initial public offering since 1975. If there's one thing A.I. companies are known for, it's losing vast sums of money. Last year, OpenAI pulled in about $13 billion in revenue, according to a person with knowledge of the company. But over the next four years, it expects to spend about $100 billion. Less is known about Anthropic's financial situation, but the company has regularly spoken about the costly nature of its work and analysts believe the company has not regularly turned a profit. SpaceX's initial stock price surge suggests that profitability has again taken a back seat to growth and industry cache. That could be positive news for Anthropic and OpenAI, which have great name recognition and are spending as fast as they are growing. The A.I. companies are expected to spend billions on leasing computing power from data centers to research new products and fuel existing ones. Is a great day for SpaceX not so great for the A.I. start-ups? A strong debut for SpaceX could be good for the overall market, but executives at Anthropic and OpenAI may not want it too be too good of a day for SpaceX. When companies of a similar class are considering going public, they often find themselves competing against one another. There are always concerns that interest could wane for the second or third big I.P.O. of the year. Of course, if traders invested early in SpaceX only to see the company's valuation tank, it may scare them off from taking a gamble on OpenAI or Anthropic. (The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, accusing them of copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)

SpaceX goes public in the largest IPO ever, and Musk crosses the trillion-dollar line

Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. Why it matters: The largest IPO in history did two things at once: it made Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire, and it quietly converted a privately held rocket company into a stock that millions of investors may soon own whether they chose to or not. SpaceX isn't asking Wall Street to price its launches or its satellites. It's asking the market to bet that a rocket company is on its way to becoming one of the most valuable AI companies on Earth, and to start paying for that future today. SpaceX began trading on the Nasdaq on Friday under the ticker SPCX, and the numbers attached to the debut are the kind that usually require a footnote to believe. The company priced 555.6 million Class A shares at $135 on Thursday evening, raising roughly $75 billion and valuing the firm at about $1.77 trillion before a single share changed hands. That makes it the biggest initial public offering in history, nearly triple Saudi Aramco's $29 billion listing in 2019, the record it displaced. The stock did what hotly anticipated debuts tend to do. It opened around $150, about 11% above the offer price, then swung as high as the $168 to $175 range in the first minutes of live trading before settling near $158 to $165 by midday. At those levels SpaceX briefly carried a market capitalization north of $2 trillion, placing it among the most valuable public companies in the world on day one. But not to be surprised, the headline most news outlets led with was personal rather than corporate. Elon Musk, who holds an estimated 42% of SpaceX and acts as chairman, chief executive, and controlling shareholder, became the world's first trillionaire, at least on paper. That wealth is tied up in stock and options across SpaceX and Tesla. Musk rang the opening bell from SpaceX's headquarters in Starbase, Texas alongside hundreds of employees, while president Gwynne Shotwell and CFO Bret Johnsen handled the ceremony in New York. "Take the fiction out of science fiction," Musk said before the session opened, restating the Mars ambitions that have always been part of the pitch. The AI story is doing a lot of the work Strip away the spectacle and the SpaceX's trillion-dollar valuation rests on a forecast, not a balance sheet. SpaceX reported a net loss of $4.9 billion in 2025 on revenue of about $18.6 billion, so investors are not paying $1.77 trillion for current profits. They are paying for what the company says comes next. The filing makes that explicit. SpaceX estimates a total addressable market of $28.5 trillion, with roughly $26.5 trillion of it attributed to AI, a category the company entered in earnest after absorbing Musk's xAI earlier this year. Beyond Starship and Starlink, the SEC documents describe plans for terrestrial data centers, custom AI microchips, and what SpaceX calls orbital AI compute infrastructure. In other words, the rocket company is asking the market to value it largely as an AI company, which is why the offering is being read as the first in an expected wave that includes OpenAI and Anthropic. For retail investors, that framing is the appeal. SpaceX targeted about 30% retail participation, well above the 10% typical of a large IPO, and the listing offers one of the few direct routes into a major AI player outside Meta, Microsoft, and Alphabet. Fidelity reported more than 500,000 buy orders within the first hour. But not everyone is buying the story The skeptics are loud, and they are not all anonymous. Morningstar this week pegged SpaceX's fair value at roughly $63 a share, less than half the IPO price, calling the offering overvalued. That is a striking gap for a name generating this much demand. The sharper critique concerns who ends up holding the stock. Several index providers, including Nasdaq and FTSE Russell, recently adopted fast-entry rules that could add SpaceX to major indexes well inside the year that benchmarks have historically required after an IPO. Because index funds must mirror their benchmarks, inclusion forces automatic buying, which means millions of savers could gain exposure to an unprofitable company without ever choosing the stock. S&P Dow Jones declined to bend its rules, so the S&P 500 will wait, but the broader point stands. Economist Paul Krugman put it most bluntly, describing Musk as a "human Ponzi scheme" and arguing that the rule changes effectively conscript ordinary investors into propping up a valuation built on belief rather than fundamentals. He notes that index and index-based funds now hold roughly 52% of mutual fund assets, which is how a debut like this reaches people who never opted in. That is the tension worth watching. SpaceX has a real and rare asset in Starlink, a launch business with no genuine competitor, and an engineering record that few firms can match. Whether any of that justifies a two-trillion-dollar valuation, or whether the AI pivot is doing more lifting than the engineering, is a question the next few quarters will start to answer. For now, the most-watched stock chart in the market belongs to a company that is selling tomorrow harder than it is selling today.

AI bubble fears spread as SpaceX preps a record IPO

Software stocks are sliding, China is selling off, and Apollo and KKR are flashing warnings. On the day of the largest listing in history, the market is finally asking what all this AI spending will actually return. On the day SpaceX prices the largest stock-market debut in history, the market underneath it has a case of nerves. The cause is not rockets. It is AI. Several warning lights are flashing at once. Together they amount to the first serious test of a trade that has carried global markets for two years. The clearest signal is in software. Wall Street has spent 2026 living through what traders at Jefferies dubbed the 'SaaSpocalypse', a rolling selloff that, by some tallies, has erased as much as $2tn from the S&P software index since its late-2025 peak. The fear is specific. If AI agents can do the work of a team of sales reps, a company needs far fewer software seats, and the per-seat licensing model that built modern software starts to wobble. The private-equity giant Apollo has turned that fear into policy. It now screens software deals for AI-displacement risk, holds zero private-equity software exposure, and keeps software below 2 per cent of its assets. Its reasoning is concentration. Software swelled from about a tenth of global buyout volume to roughly 40 per cent at the peak, a level Apollo calls 'a fairly significant red flag'. The nervousness is spreading It is no longer just software. Hong Kong and mainland Chinese shares fell on Wednesday, with tech stocks among the hardest hit, as AI-bubble fears tracked a retreat on Wall Street. In Washington, Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced a bill, the AI Bubble Transparency Act, that would force banks to disclose their debt and equity exposure to chipmakers, data centres and hyperscalers. She casts the concentration as a systemic risk. And KKR's top macro strategist, Henry McVey, told clients the boom is real but will make the economy 'more extreme than anything we have seen since the start of the second industrial revolution' in the 1870s. Some sectors are 'starved', he wrote, while a handful, tech, high-end services and government, run 'flush'. Defence and power, the firm reckons, are the likeliest long-term winners. Underneath all of it sits the capex. Hyperscaler infrastructure spending is approaching $660bn this year, the largest corporate investment programme in history outside wartime, and increasingly funded by debt. Amazon's borrowing has passed $225bn, and Oracle just overshot its own capex guidance, with tens of billions more to come. The bear case is simple. Spending on this scale only pays off if AI moves from 'copilot' features to autonomous agents that justify the next order of magnitude of compute. If adoption plateaus, the return on $660bn a year falls below the cost of capital. The bull case is just as real. This is not 2000. As TNW has noted before, valuations and concentration sit above dot-com peaks on some measures, with the CAPE ratio near 38. But unlike the dot-com darlings, today's leaders are enormously profitable, and the capex cycle has barely begun to produce results. The honest answer to 'is this a bubble?' is that no one can know until the spending either delivers or it doesn't. What changed this week is that the market started asking the question out loud, after two years of not wanting to. SpaceX is not an AI company. But its debut, and the OpenAI and Anthropic listings lining up behind it, will be the closest thing to a real-time referendum on whether investors still believe. A wobble is not a crash. But for the first time in a while, the people writing the cheques are visibly weighing the question the boom has waved away: what, exactly, does all this return?

SpaceX IPO: the real test is OpenAI and Anthropic

The SpaceX IPO prices this week as the biggest in history. How it trades will reset valuations across private tech, and serve as a stress test for the two AI labs queued to follow it onto public markets. The SpaceX IPO is set to price the biggest stock-market debut in history on Wednesday, raising about $75bn at a valuation near $1.75tn and trading on Nasdaq from Thursday. But the most consequential thing about Elon Musk's rocket company going public may have little to do with rockets, or with Musk. It is what the listing does to everyone else. For the venture-capital industry, SpaceX is the thaw after a long freeze. Just 23 venture-backed tech firms went public in the US in 2025, down from 77 four years earlier, and the capital that funds have tied up in private bets has had nowhere to go. SpaceX's debut, already massively oversubscribed, hands that ecosystem its first large payout in years: early backers such as Antonio Gracias's Valor Equity Partners, on a roughly 4 per cent stake worth almost $70bn at $135 a share, alongside Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and Sequoia, stand to return tens of billions to their own investors, who will recycle much of it into the next wave of startups. The listing will also mint thousands of employee millionaires. The read-through to OpenAI and Anthropic The more important signal is what comes next. OpenAI and Anthropic have both confidentially filed to go public, and together with SpaceX they make up an IPO pipeline that could eventually bring $3.6tn of new stock onto public markets. How SpaceX trades in its first weeks will shape the benchmark investors use to price the two AI labs, and test whether the market has the appetite to absorb that much new equity at once. Wall Street already has a name for the worry: more shares than buyers. That makes the debut a genuine stress test rather than a victory lap. SpaceX is targeting revenue multiples beyond even Palantir's, leaving 'virtually no margin for error', as PitchBook's Franco Granda put it. Bulls point to real income, including reported payments of around $920m a month from Google for Starlink capacity and about $1.25bn a month from Anthropic for AI infrastructure. Bears remember Facebook's 2012 IPO, which slumped after listing and froze the new-issue market for more than a year. A wobble this time would land on OpenAI and Anthropic before they have even priced. The structural caveats remain. Musk keeps roughly 79 per cent of the voting power on about 42 per cent of the equity through a dual-class structure that led one Danish pension fund to blacklist the deal, and a tangle of opaque special-purpose vehicles has sprung up to sell SpaceX exposure to investors who could not get in directly. None of it has dented demand. But the deeper question, posed by Caplight's Javier Avalos, is whether any company can 'be private for 20-plus years, raise billions privately and still have juice once they go public'. SpaceX is about to provide the answer, and OpenAI and Anthropic are watching as closely as anyone.

After SpaceX's huge IPO, Americans' financial future will be bound to AI

They're about to get more AI rammed down their throats, stuck into their pension plans and investment portfolios Americans are growing worried about what artificial intelligence portends for their futures. Eight in 10 Americans report concern over AI, compared with a third who report being excited, according to a recent Quinnipiac poll. More than half think it will do more harm than good in their daily lives. Seven out of 10 think it will reduce the number of available jobs. Skeptical though they may be, they are about to get more AI rammed down their throats and stuck into their pension plans and their investment portfolios, whether they want it or not - binding their futures ever more tightly to the frenzied, risky, multibillion-dollar dash by technology moguls to develop machines capable of mimicking human thought processes to take over cognitive tasks. First up is this week's massive $75bn initial public offering (IPO) for Elon Musk's SpaceX, the largest ever, which at $135 a share will value the company at a cool $1.77tn, among the 10 largest companies in the world by market capitalization. While the company makes most of its money these days selling internet access, it largely needs the money to finance Musk's vast AI ambitions, which include blasting datacenters into orbit. The offering is just the first in a series: both Anthropic and OpenAI have already filed paperwork for their own IPOs later in the year, which will add two multitrillion-dollar artificial intelligence behemoths to the US's main stock indices. Even investors who don't care to buy their stock will end up owning a bunch, either in their 401(k) retirement plans or among their holdings of market index funds - supposedly safer investments for non-professional investors, built to reflect the entire market - which are forced to buy AI shares in proportion to their weighting in stock indices like the Nasdaq and the S&P. This may not happen right away, but it will happen. Musk has been lobbying for SpaceX to be quickly invited onto the indices, which would force index funds to buy the stock, no matter its price, and providing it a hefty boost. The tech-heavy Nasdaq changed its rules to fast-track the listing of behemoths like SpaceX. So did the FTSE Russell, to ease the entry of megacaps to its US indices. Standard & Poor's is sticking to its rules. This means SpaceX will have to post a profit - which it has not yet done - make a minimum set of shares available to the public and wait about a year to get onto the S&P 500, the most tracked index. The SpaceX offering, moreover, amounts to less than 5% of its shares - which will limit its immediate footprint. But if SpaceX follows the pattern set by large firms after their IPOs, some half of its shares could be trading openly by the time it joins the S&P 500 next year. This would give it about a 1.5% share of the S&P 500's market capitalization of more than $60tn - forcing index funds to plow hundreds of billions into Elon Musk's gambit to become the world's first trillionaire. If this sounds like a risky bet, it is. Musk, the guy who at the helm of "Doge" tried to devastate the federal bureaucracy, firing employees hand over fist, and who helped dismantle USAID despite knowing it would lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths, will have sole control over the company on which the retirement of many Americans may depend, allowing him to follow his baser instincts wherever they lead. And that's not the half of it. The so-called "magnificent seven" tech goliaths - Nvidia, Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Tesla - already account for more than a third of the S&P 500's market value. Investors' views on the tech titans' massive AI investments have largely driven the ups and downs of the equity market as a whole. Adding SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic to this set will give tech billionaires an even tighter grip on Americans' financial future as they pursue their dystopian sci-fi dreams, free from any sort of government regulation. There may be a silver lining - of sorts. Having a lot of AI stock in a retirement plan may offer a hedge for the newly irrelevant workers displaced by artificial intelligence, granting them some stake in the economic fruits of the new hi-tech economy. But the balance of risks points in the wrong direction. A future in which the new AI agents hypercharge economic productivity and propel human prosperity to where it has never gone before remains an aspiration. Claims of astonishing progress by the latest AI models may well be true. But they have not been matched by significant gains in productivity. Dystopian scenarios appear ever more probable even as the economic rewards investors are counting on remain stuck far off on the horizon. Money eventually tires. It scares. It moves on to a new story. The Nasdaq fell more than 4% recently, shaken out of its optimistic stupor by indications that a robust labor market may force the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates later this year. This should remind us all that the AI extravaganza that has pumped the Nasdaq and the S&P 500 over the last year could come to an abrupt end - maybe just on the other side of Musk's trillionaire moment. Americans don't know what an AI-heavy future might bring about. But they do have vivid experiences of the pain that courses through society when a financial bubble built on hubris ends in collapse. The great financial crisis of 2008 will look like a cartoon compared with what will befall the finances of most Americans if the AI dream tucked into their investments turns into a nightmare.

How Elon Musk rewrote SpaceX's story -- and turned it into the greatest IPO debut in history | Fortune

The IPO on June 12 was a crucial test of whether the world would buy his new, epic vision, or not. A big jump over the offer price of $135 would show a ringing endorsement, while a dive would signal that folks and funds just weren't buying Musk's futuristic promises for the likes of super-low-cost orbital data centers powered by the sun. Around noon, we got the answer: SpaceX shares shot higher at the open, and closed at $160. a 19% jump. By day's end the market cap notched an incredible $2.2. trillion, easily becoming the biggest U.S. IPO of all time, easily eclipsing number two Alibaba (2014) by ten-fold. Hence, investors are proving true believers, they're all-in on Musk promises not only that AI will prove an absolutely colossal market, but effectively that he'll capture a lot more of it than a roster of mega-rivals encompassing Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and sundry hustling challengers. A key chart in the SpaceX prospectus shows just how heavily Musk's counting on AI versus his other two businesses. He forecasts a future total addressable market for the enterprise of $28.5 trillion, and that of that total, AI will account for $26.5 trillion or 93%. That's almost 14 times the combined $2.0 trillion for its satellite and rocket sides. The implication: The rocket and Starlink mobile and broadband sectors will grow fast, but AI will supply the moonshot. Indeed, the Space segment generated just $4.1 billion in revenue last year, and suffered losses. At present, Starlink's the jewel. In 2025, its sales vaulted 50% year-over-year to $11.4 billion, furnishing over half SpaceX's top line. Starlink operates a galaxy of 9,600 satellites, three-quarters of the total fleet in orbit. Over ten-million users pay subscriptions for mobile and broadband service. The business is well protected, since it's far the biggest global purveyor in commercial satellites. It's also an annuity-style steady source of cash flow. During a June 6 interview hosted by J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, Musk made a strong case for Starlink's prospects, and especially its competitive moat. Musk noted that the new Starship reigns as the world's first fully-reusable rocket. Its only major expense is what's in the tank, the hydrogen-methane blend that's cheaper than jet fuel. These fiery towers can carry as many as 50 satellites in a single flight. Musk projects that SpaceX will expand its network ten-fold to 100,000 digital birds in the years ahead, and that his superior capacity and extremely low cost ensure by far the dominant position for years to come. Musk's own math dictates that SpaceX is now an AI play, and needs to deliver bigger than big time SpaceX doesn't specify the period covered by its total addressable market forecasts. We can assume they're cumulative figures that run at least a couple of decades. The rub: SpaceX is starting life as a publicly traded player at a valuation of $2.2 trillion. According to a discounted cash flow analysis by David Trainer, CEO of research firm New Constructs, it would need sales of at least $1.1 trillion by 2035 to justify the "underwriting" valuation of $1.75 trillion. The revenue bogey is 50% more than the top sales-maker, Amazon, posted in the past four quarters. By Fortune's estimate, the big bump on June 12 hiked the sales requirement by about a third to almost $1.5 trillion. But as Musk states in the TAM tables, the two non-AI areas "only" promise $1.6 trillion combined. And we're talking over 20 or 30 years. It's impossible to know Musk's estimates for their annual sales in, say, 2035, but we could be talking a couple of hundred billion. Getting there would be a huge coup -- and highly challenging by the way -- but it wouldn't get SpaceX anywhere near the way over $1 trillion it will need to hand shareholders a decent return. Bottom line: AI will need to do the heavy lifting. The transformation of SpaceX into an AI play created matchless buzz that's spawned the biggest valuation ever for a debut. But it's also hugely raised the bar on what Musk must achieve, especially following that huge first-day pop. As Reena Aggarwal, a Georgetown University professor who's an expert in IPOs puts it, "SpaceX's debut isn't about valuation based on fundamentals, but supply and demand for its shares." Now, investors will look beyond the buzz to the trajectory of sales and profits, and where they're leading. Given the orbital-high hopes, any disappointment will trigger a hurtling descent.

SpaceX overtakes Amazon to become world's fifth most valuable firm

Just three trading days after its record IPO, SpaceX has leapfrogged Amazon to become the world's fifth most valuable listed company, with its shares briefly carrying it past Microsoft during a frenetic Tuesday session. Elon Musk's space and AI conglomerate ended its third day of public trading worth roughly $2.65 trillion (€2.28tn), having displaced Amazon in the global market-capitalisation rankings. The stock settled at $201.8 per share, in a debut week that has rewritten the upper reaches of the world's equity leaderboard at remarkable speed. The milestone caps an already extraordinary stretch for the company, which listed on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX only last Friday. SpaceX priced 555.6 million Class A shares at $135 each, raising around $75 billion (€65bn) in what was the largest initial public offering in history, comfortably eclipsing the $29.4 billion (€25.3bn) that Saudi Aramco raised in 2019. The company also increased the total capital raised to $85.7 billion (€73.8bn) after underwriters exercised the "greenshoe" option to purchase additional shares on Monday due to exceptional demand. At Tuesday's close, the stock was trading more than 50% above its IPO price. During the trading session, share prices climbed as high as $225.6, briefly pushing SpaceX's valuation above $3 trillion (€2.58tn) and, for a moment, ahead of Microsoft as the world's fourth most valuable company. The stock later pared those gains, closing below that threshold, but the intraday spike underscored the intensity of investor appetite for the listing. Based on Tuesday's closing prices, only Nvidia ($5tr), Alphabet ($4.5tr), Apple ($4.4tr) and Microsoft ($2.9tr) had larger market capitalisations than SpaceX. Eight of the world's ten most valuable listed companies are tied to the technology and AI sector, a concentration that has defined markets throughout 2026. The Cursor deal fuels the surge Tuesday's advance coincided with a significant strategic move. Before the opening bell, SpaceX announced an all-stock agreement to acquire Anysphere, the developer behind the AI coding assistant Cursor, in a deal valuing the startup at $60 billion (€51.7bn). According to a regulatory filing, a SpaceX subsidiary will merge into Anysphere, leaving Cursor as a wholly owned arm of the group, with completion expected in the third quarter, subject to regulatory approval. The purchase deepens SpaceX's push into enterprise AI, a market where rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic have gained early commercial traction, and it follows the company's merger with Musk's xAI venture in February. The acquisition stems from an option SpaceX secured in April, under which it agreed either to acquire Cursor for $60 billion (€51.7bn) later this year or pay $10 billion (€8.6bn) for a more limited partnership to access its computing technology. However, despite all the positive news, the speed of the climb has drawn caution. Sceptics argue that SpaceX remains overvalued, given that it has yet to turn a profit and only 3% to 4% of its total equity is publicly traded. A fast-track route into major stock indices, which compels passive funds to buy the shares, is expected to further amplify demand for the limited supply of shares in the opening days of trading. This article does not constitute financial advice, always do your own research and invest according to your specific circumstances.

Surging SpaceX overtakes Amazon to become 5th biggest company

San Francisco (United States) (AFP) - SpaceX shares surged again Tuesday, lifting Elon Musk's rocket company above Amazon into fifth place in market value as a record-breaking IPO gives way to a torrid buying frenzy. Near 1900 GMT, shares of SpaceX, formally Space Exploration Technologies Corp., stood at $213.35, up 10.8 percent. That gives the company a market capitalization of around $2.8 trillion. The latest rise came as SpaceX announced it will acquire artificial intelligence coding startup Cursor for $60 billion, a deal designed to further cement the Texas-based company near the nexus of the AI boom. The SpaceX fever partly stems from enthusiasm over the company's growth potential, including AI. But at least as important are dynamics that have nothing to do with the company's operations or profit outlook. "There is no valuation support for this market cap as it's all retail excitement meeting a very small float and no institutional sellers," said Eric Clark, a portfolio manager and chief investment officer at Accuvest Global Advisors. "It's just a momentum trade and retail excitement plus active growth managers wanting exposure," Clark said in an email that described SpaceX's growth potential as a "five-to-10-year game." Shares of SpaceX have soared about 40 percent in three sessions since last week's IPO, which raised a record-breaking $85.7 billion. "There's a bit of a mania involving AI and anything that could be one of the beneficiaries of the spending on AI," said Steve Sosnick of Interactive Brokers. Co-founded by Musk in 2002, the rocket startup has since expanded into a major satellite operator and has also folded in Musk's artificial intelligence company -- xAI -- which includes the social media platform X (formerly Twitter). Cursor SpaceX's acquisition of Cursor marks its latest big AI investment. Founded in 2022 and based in San Francisco, Cursor specializes in AI for software development, particularly for business uses. An acquisition had looked possible after the two companies had announced a partnership in April that included a clause for Cursor to be potentially bought by SpaceX for $60 billion. Cursor's emergence has coincided with the growth of "vibe coding," whereby online users build applications with AI-generated code. At its last funding round in November, Cursor was valued at $29 billion. Tuesday's deal more than doubles that sum. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, SpaceX said the all-stock deal was expected to close in the third quarter of this year and that Cursor would become a wholly owned subsidiary. In May, SpaceX announced plans to invest $55 billion to build a "Terafab" semiconductor factory in Texas, producing chips for artificial intelligence as well as robotics. In early May, AI startup Anthropic announced a partnership with SpaceX under which it would pay for use of the compute capacity at SpaceX's Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee. Bubble? These ventures have cemented investor belief that SpaceX resides at the nexus of key AI developments. Investor consensus also continues to propel Musk, already the world's wealthiest person, whose role as Tesla CEO also brings exposure to new developments in autonomous driving and robotics. While SpaceX has won plenty of attention, the company's lofty ambitions for AI are expected to consume capital for at least the next few years. SpaceX reported a loss of $4.3 billion last year. SpaceX's valuation puts it within striking range of Microsoft, which is currently worth $2.92 trillion, according to Yahoo Finance. Nvidia is first with nearly a $5.1 trillion valuation. But portfolio manager Clark expects SpaceX's "bubbliscious" valuation to ebb once additional shares hit the market. "The history of large IPOs is during the first year, and historically, there's a big drawdown," Clark said. "That should happen when the float expands and people get a chance to match the fundamentals via the first quarterly report with the valuation and market cap." Clark said SpaceX may one day justify such a valuation but "momentum, euphoria, and hype is a fickle beast, and this market is out of line across many stocks for now."

SpaceX IPO extends Elon Musk's influence across AI and the economy

Elon Musk controls reusable rockets that are the backbone of the U.S. space program. His constellation of satellites in space represents a pillar of U.S. defense. And he has struck deals with leading artificial intelligence companies to fuel the AI revolution. Now the public sale of SpaceX's shares has not only dramatically increased Musk's wealth, making him the world's first trillionaire, but also expanded his reach into pivotal sectors of the global economy. All the while, it sets up Musk's rocket company to dominate the cosmos as entities across the globe vie for control of space. "U.S. space power is built on the back of SpaceX. Period. Full stop. What does that mean?" asked Clayton Swope, deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "It means SpaceX has incredible leverage over the government right now." The IPO is the largest in history, raising $75 billion to fuel the company's ambitions. But SpaceX also has a recent track record of losing billions of dollars, including $13 billion since the beginning of 2023. In IPO documents, SpaceX laid out an ambitious plan to become an essential hub of the artificial intelligence age. Despite building its reputation on space launches and its satellite internet service, Starlink, SpaceX sees the vast majority of its market opportunity -- all but $2 trillion of an estimated $28.5 trillion -- in artificial intelligence. That opportunity rests on major, even far-fetched, bets. A constellation of millions of satellites for space-based data centers will power AI from orbit, and the company will vastly expand its Starlink internet service. Starshield, SpaceX's secure satellite network for government, will be used for defense and national security applications. The diversity of SpaceX's business, which spans AI, social media and internet connectivity, will likely make it a clearinghouse of lucrative data, allowing it to improve on various capabilities and outpace rivals. Its plans are ambitious. Musk has upended global industries -- making electric cars mainstream, bringing internet access to remote areas with thousands of satellites, and reviving the space program. With SpaceX's IPO, Musk turns his boundary-breaking approach to space, combining capabilities his firm has honed over decades. Musk mused recently, in an interview with SpaceX employees posted on X, about a core facet of the company's mission. "How do you decide what progress a civilization has made?" Musk asked. So far, humanity is harnessing a tiny amount of Earth's power and a minuscule proportion of the sun's, he added, marking gaps SpaceX hopes to fill. The company's plans however, are raising concerns among some in the space and tech sectors about the level of power SpaceX has amassed -- which may give him tremendous sway over the U.S. space program. That power takes several forms. "The cost is the big one for me," Swope said. "Where is the best value proposition? Is it with the company that holds all the cards?" By taking SpaceX public, Musk has realized an ambition that began more than two decades ago when he took the earnings from the sale of PayPal and seeded them into two companies: Tesla, which debuted on the stock market in 2010 and went on to become the world's most valuable automaker, and SpaceX, where the entrepreneur pioneered reusable rockets and made space exploration into a private enterprise. The space company was listed on the Nasdaq composite index on Friday, under the ticker symbol "SPCX" and began trading shortly before 11:50 a.m. Its IPO shares were priced Thursday at $135 each. SpaceX's significant losses have not muted its hype. The company has attracted an unusual level of interest from retail buyers, who have jockeyed for a stake in the next potential Musk moonshot. To some, SpaceX's business case is underscored by the high level of importance the U.S. government ascribes to it. "This is the United States space program," said Ross Gerber, a SpaceX investor who has emerged as a Musk critic in recent years. "We've outsourced from NASA to SpaceX." In IPO documents, SpaceX described how its satellites have been deputized for potential defense purposes. "What this really is about is about national security and expanding our ... footprint in space in a way that no other country could," Gerber added. This interdependent relationship provides upsides for the company, Gerber said, but "there is a risk inherent," in the country's level of dependency. Analysts had expected significant buy-in for SpaceX's ideas on the public markets. "Musk has always been very good at selling the future to investors, so I am not surprised by the excitement'" said David Meier, senior investment analyst at the Motley Fool, before the rocket company's shares started trading. Meier noted, however, that SpaceX's IPO pricing and valuation looked "very aggressive relative to the financial performance it has put up and expects to put up in the near future." Still, SpaceX may not shatter all of the lofty expectations built into its IPO. Nick Smith, a senior analyst at research firm and IPO stock index Renaissance Capital, said IPOs of large companies have a mixed track record. For every winner like Meta, Smith said that there are also losers including Rivian. The electric vehicle company went public in 2021 with a market value of about $100 billion as its stock shot up on its first trading day. Today Rivian is worth about $20 billion. Smith noted that SpaceX's investment bankers have sketched out a path to booming revenue, including from two deals with AI rivals Anthropic and Google to rent out data center capacity from SpaceX's xAI business and plans to deploy a more capable but much delayed rocket. If SpaceX's annual revenue climbs well above $100 billion in a few years from about $19 billion last year, "I think the valuation is OK if you believe it can do that," Smith said. Smith also said that Musk inspires a magical faith in his capabilities to make the impossible happen. This "Musk effect," Smith said, makes his companies' value become "divorced" from typical calculations of what companies should be worth. Swope, the senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said he is hopeful SpaceX won't outgrow the entities it has served in the past. "The government's mission and U.S. space power are so dependent on this company," Swope said. "No one wants to see the period where it could be weakened." Still, he wondered of the IPO, "How will it change the company?"

Why Oppenheimer Analysts Are Bullish on SpaceX, the 'East India Company of Space'

Get personalized, AI-powered answers built on 27+ years of trusted expertise. An early review of SpaceX stock is in, and it's glowing. Oppenheimer on Thursday initiated coverage of SpaceX stock with an "Outperform" rating and a $190 price target. SpaceX shares are expected to begin trading tomorrow under the ticker "SPCX" at a $135 IPO price. "We believe that SpaceX will use its expertise in engineering, manufacturing and space technologies to grow to the largest communications, cloud/AI company in the world," Oppenheimer analysts wrote in a note on Thursday. They expect the company's sizable technological lead in rocket and satellite technology, its vertical integration and its scale to help it grow revenue from $19 billion last year to more than $200 billion by 2030. They see SpaceX as a leader in three distinct lines of business -- Starlink and connectivity, launch and space services, and artificial intelligence -- that overlap such that each unit contributes to the others' success and lowers costs across the company. Today, Starlink is the cash cow. It grew revenue about 50% last year, accounting for more than half of total sales. Its healthy free cash flows are helping to fund the massive capital expenditures of the launch and AI businesses. The launch business, and specifically its next-generation Starship, "is key to SpaceX's success," according to Oppenheimer. Starship is still in tests, but once operational it's expected to cut SpaceX's "cost-to-orbit" to about $100 per kilogram from about $2,700 today. Oppenheimer believes lower costs will enable SpaceX to expand its Starlink satellite constellation and make data centers in space economically viable, supporting its third business line -- AI. SpaceX puts the potential value of its AI business at $26 trillion -- about 90% of its total addressable market -- but it has a long way to go. AI is the company's least mature business, with just over $3 billion in revenue last year. Its Grok model trails competitors from Alphabet, OpenAI and Anthropic in capabilities. AI is also its most expensive business, accounting for more than 60% of SpaceX's capital expenditures last year. According to Oppenheimer, SpaceX could build "a vertically integrated AI stack that no other company on Earth can replicate." That full stack will consist of a foundational model (Grok); an application layer, secured through the possible acquisition of AI coding agent Cursor; semiconductors designed and made in-house as part of its Terafab project; and orbital data centers. Whether the last component is even possible is still unknown, "but SpaceX has arguably the best engineers and the company has a history of executing on tough deliverables," says Oppenheimer. Granted, investing in SpaceX comes with a lot of risk. Its valuation is rich, with shares priced at 100x sales. The most expensive stock in the S&P 500 by that measure, Palantir (PLTR), has a price-to-sales ratio of about 65. It's especially pricey considering growth hinges on unproven technologies. Oppenheimer also expects the stock's small float -- less than 5% of shares will trade following its IPO -- to make it volatile. And then there's Elon Musk, who has complete control over SpaceX, runs several other companies, and "has historically had controversial political/social views" that have hurt business in the past. These risks -- especially the valuation -- have some market watchers recommending investors sit out Friday's debut and wait for shares to re-enter Earth's stratosphere. Morningstar recently valued SpaceX at $780 billion, nearly $1 trillion less than what's implied by its IPO price. They expect shares to catch an updraft from investor enthusiasm and a scarcity of shares on day one, but to face resistance in the following months as new stock hits the market and investors look ahead to more blockbuster IPOs on the horizon. But, ultimately, Oppenheimer estimates the risks pale in comparison to the galactic opportunities. They see potential for SpaceX to expand the horizons of the economy itself and pioneer industries like lunar development, interplanetary passenger and cargo transport, space tourism, and asteroid mining, just to name a few. "Should SpaceX execute on its mission -- and we believe it will -- it will be the modern-day East India Company of space, controlling routes, infrastructure, and commerce of an entire frontier and giving it a quasi-sovereign reach, far beyond that of any ordinary corporation."

SpaceX Mania: How Elon Musk's rocket giant became Wall Street's biggest story - ​Biggest IPO in US Market History

SpaceX Mania: How Elon Musk's rocket giant became Wall Street's biggest story 1/14 Biggest IPO in US Market History SpaceX made history with its blockbuster Nasdaq debut, raising approximately $75 billion in what became the largest IPO ever in the United States. The offering valued the company at around $1.77 trillion, instantly placing it among the world's most valuable publicly traded companies and marking a new chapter in Elon Musk's business empire. (Sources: Yahoo Finance, CNBC, BBC News, Reuters, TechCrunch) 2/14 Stock Frenzy Takes Hold The excitement surrounding SpaceX did not end with its market debut. Shares surged in the days following the IPO as both retail and institutional investors rushed to gain exposure. Massive trading volumes reflected strong confidence in the company's future, turning SpaceX into one of the most actively discussed stocks on Wall Street. 3/14 Why the Stock Keeps Rising Investors are increasingly viewing SpaceX as more than a launch and satellite company. The market sees opportunities across multiple high-growth areas, including space transportation, global internet connectivity through Starlink, and artificial intelligence. This broader vision has helped fuel continued enthusiasm for the stock despite its already lofty valuation. 4/14 The Elon Musk Premium A significant part of SpaceX's appeal comes from Elon Musk's reputation for building transformative businesses. Many investors believe that Musk's track record with companies such as Tesla and other ventures justifies paying a premium for future growth. As a result, market confidence is being driven not only by current financial performance but also by expectations of future innovation. 5/14 Is SpaceX Getting Too Hot? The rapid rise in SpaceX's share price has sparked debate among analysts and market commentators. Some believe the stock's valuation is running ahead of its underlying fundamentals, while others argue that investors are simply pricing in long-term growth opportunities. The strong participation of retail traders has also led to comparisons with previous momentum-driven market rallies. 6/14 Overtaking Corporate Giants Within days of going public, SpaceX's market capitalization climbed rapidly, allowing it to surpass several established corporate giants. At one point, the company overtook Amazon in market value and joined the ranks of the world's largest publicly traded firms. The speed of this ascent underscored the extraordinary investor appetite for the stock. 7/14 Beyond Space Exploration Artificial intelligence is emerging as a major component of SpaceX's long-term strategy. The company sees AI as a powerful tool for improving satellite operations, automating complex systems, enhancing software development, and creating new business opportunities. Investors increasingly view AI as an important pillar of SpaceX's future growth story. 8/14 SpaceX Acquires Anysphere In one of the largest AI transactions ever announced, SpaceX agreed to acquire Anysphere, the developer behind the AI coding assistant Cursor. The all-stock deal, valued at approximately $60 billion, highlights the company's ambition to expand aggressively into software and artificial intelligence beyond its traditional aerospace operations. 9/14 AI for Developers Cursor has become one of the fastest-growing AI-powered coding platforms, helping developers write, review and optimize software. By acquiring Anysphere, SpaceX gains access to a rapidly expanding developer ecosystem while strengthening its position in enterprise AI. The deal also creates opportunities to integrate advanced coding tools into its broader technology platform. 10/14 Building an Integrated Platform The Anysphere acquisition is expected to enhance SpaceX's AI capabilities across multiple areas. It provides access to cutting-edge software expertise, accelerates AI development efforts and strengthens the company's ability to compete with major technology firms. Investors see the deal as a strategic step toward building a more comprehensive AI ecosystem. 11/14 Life After the IPO As a publicly listed company, SpaceX now faces greater scrutiny from investors and analysts. While the IPO generated enormous excitement, future performance will depend on the company's ability to deliver sustained growth and execute on its ambitious plans. Market participants will closely monitor financial results, business expansion and strategic investments. 12/14 Challenges Ahead Despite the optimism, SpaceX faces several important risks. Its valuation remains extremely high, creating pressure to maintain rapid growth. The company must also successfully integrate major acquisitions, navigate regulatory requirements and compete in increasingly crowded technology and AI markets. Any slowdown in execution could test investor confidence. 13/14 What Could Drive the Next Leg Higher? Several factors could support continued growth in SpaceX's valuation. Expansion of Starlink's subscriber base, additional government and commercial contracts, successful AI product launches and deeper penetration into enterprise software markets all represent potential growth drivers. These opportunities form the basis of the bullish case for the company. 14/14 SpaceX's Next Mission SpaceX's historic IPO has transformed the company from a private aerospace leader into one of the most closely watched public companies in the world. The combination of space technology, global connectivity and artificial intelligence has created a compelling growth narrative that continues to attract investors. The coming years will determine whether the company can translate its ambitious vision into sustained business success and justify the extraordinary expectations now reflected in its valuation.

Trillionaire Elon Musk Wants To Take His Partnership With NVIDIA To The "Next Level" After A Historic SpaceX IPO

Now that SpaceX shares are trading freely following a historic IPO, one that has made Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire, an expansive partnership with NVIDIA is apparently the next order of business, with Musk publicly professing his desire to deepen the bond between the two mega-companies. It seems SpaceX and NVIDIA are cooking something new, as inferred by NVIDIA's hearty congratulations to SpaceX for a flawless IPO, and reciprocated by Elon Musk with equal effusiveness SpaceX ended today's regular trading session with gains of over 19 percent, which propelled its market cap to $2.11 trillion, and crowned Elon Musk as the world's first trillionaire. Just hours after SpaceX shares began trading on the Nasdaq exchange, NVIDIA penned an effusive X post, congratulating the SpaceX team for pulling off a "historic IPO debut." Then, within hours, Elon Musk reciprocated with his own effervescent comments, pledging to take the "exciting partnership with NVIDIA to the next level." This comes as SpaceX has now unveiled its first dedicated satellite design for AI compute. Dubbed the AI1 satellite, it can support up to 150kW of peak compute payload, replete with liquid radiators, meteoride shielding, a centralized compute module, and deployable solar arrays. These satellites will be manufactured at SpaceX's Gigasat facility in Texas. Perhaps the NVIDIA partnership that Musk is alluding to pertains to these AI1 satellites. SpaceX is also rapidly building out its Terafab in collaboration with Tesla and Intel. Meanwhile, in the runup to its IPO, SpaceX locked a Cloud Service Agreement with Google, furnishing it with a compute capacity equivalent to "110,000 NVIDIA GPUs, CPUs, memory, and other related components," all for a consideration of $920 million per month. Also, the parent company of Starlink and xAI recently inked a similar agreement with Anthropic, providing access to "220,000 NVIDIA GPUs (including H100s, H200s, GB200s, and others)," all for a consideration of $1.25 billion per month or $15 billion per yea Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.

Will SpaceX factor last after IPO? Mega listing plan sparks valuation debate amid AI boom

SpaceX's huge IPO is set to launch, attracting record investor bids. This event will test the market's appetite for AI companies. Investors are watching to see if it signals continued growth or a market peak. The offering's success could influence future AI IPOs from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. This IPO is a significant moment for global markets. Few IPOs in recent years have been as avidly anticipated and sparked as much debate as rocket and artificial intelligence (AI) company SpaceX's blockbuster issue. As the Elon Musk-founded company gears up for listing on Friday after attracting record investor bids for its roughly $75 billion IPO, the largest ever, the discussion extends beyond the stock's debut. Investors are asking whether it will validate the torrent of money that has flowed into AI-linked companies and prolong Wall Street's dream bull run or serve as a signal that market optimism has reached its peak. Saudi Aramco's $29.4 billion issue in 2019 was the largest IPO before this. Mega listing plan sparks valuation debate amid AI boom Stress Test The 555.6-million-share IPO of SpaceX was subscribed more than four times on Wednesday night. The bids underscore investor appetite for the hottest investment theme currently, AI, allowing SpaceX to target an eye-popping $1.75 trillion valuation on debut, turning it instantly into one of the world's most valuable companies. The valuation target, along with the company's losses and questions over corporate governance, has led to heightened scepticism about the stock's prospects, with veteran short seller Jim Chanos warning the offering does not justify the astronomical valuation. SpaceX posted revenue of $18.67 billion in 2025, up 33% from the previous year, along with a net loss of $4.94 billion. To be sure, it's also some kind of a referendum on Musk. To his dedicated fanbase, Musk can do no wrong. Naysayers warn investors against getting swept up in the general euphoria of a listing pop lest they be left holding the pieces down the line. Beyond the scale, SpaceX's listing has greater significance for global markets riding the AI wave. It's a stress test of market appetite for the high-growth, capital-intensive AI theme as equity supply risks are set to rise. It will also signal how much tolerance investors have for losses posted by some stars of the AI firmament. "There is also a psychological element to the supply-demand picture with SpaceX," BNP Paribas Securities analysts wrote in a recent client note. "Many investors will likely anticipate that the deal size is only the tip of a supply iceberg." OpenAI and rival Anthropic recently made confidential filings for mega IPOs, seeking to capitalise on the voracious investor demand for AI-linked shares. Both these companies may be targeting trillion-dollar valuations. "Follow-on issuance and stock lock-ups expiring plus possible IPOs for OpenAI and Anthropic collectively amount to much more equity supply," said the BNP note. For seasoned investors, a likely glut of AI-linked IPOs and share sales evokes memories of the dotcom boom. At that time, investors snapped up shares at astounding prices, ignoring losses and the absence of viable business models. As comparisons with previous market bubbles resurface, so too has the familiar refrain that "this time is different" with proponents arguing that the scale of investment flowing into AI and its growing commercial adoption set the current boom apart from past ones.

SpaceX shares tumble as post-IPO frenzy loses steam

Shares of Elon Musk's rockets-to-AI firm SpaceX dropped nearly nine per cent on Thursday, as the post-IPO frenzy that briefly placed it among the top five most valuable companies of the world appeared to fizzle out. Its shares were last down 8.8 per cent to US$174.8, after falling nearly five per cent in the last session. Despite the losses, the stock still traded more than 29 per cent above its $135 offering price. Earlier this week, the market capitalization of SpaceX overtook that of Amazon, momentarily even surpassing that of Microsoft. Bloomberg News reports on Thursday that SpaceX bankers were preparing for a bond sale of at least $20 billion. SpaceX also said earlier this week that it is buying Anysphere, the startup behind the popular AI coding agent Cursor, for $60 billion in an all-stock deal.

A Word in Your Ear: SpaceX, an IPO Between AI and Mars

With a valuation of $1,770bn, SpaceX is preparing to execute the largest IPO in history. This is more than enough to capture the attention of investors who have dreamed for years of owning a piece of Elon Musk's empire. But upon reading the IPO prospectus, a surprise quickly emerges: SpaceX no longer presents itself solely as an aerospace player. The company is now structured around three distinct business lines that completely redefine its profile. More Than Just a Rocket Manufacturer Space remains, of course, the historical heart of SpaceX. Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Dragon, and soon Starship continue to form the group's foundation. Accounting for more than 80% of the world's mass launched into orbit, the company largely dominates its market. However, rockets are no longer the sole source of growth. Starlink has become an essential pillar of the business, with over 10m subscribers across 164 countries. In 2025, connectivity generated more than $11bn in revenue, surpassing traditional space activities. This evolution demonstrates that SpaceX no longer views space merely as a destination, but as an infrastructure capable of supporting a much broader ecosystem. Artificial Intelligence at the Center of the Project The true novelty of the filing, however, concerns artificial intelligence. Following the integration of xAI and the X platform, SpaceX now houses the Grok models, the COLOSSUS data centers, and the infrastructure necessary for their operation. This reorganization profoundly transforms the nature of the company. An investor buying a share of SpaceX is no longer just investing in launch vehicles or satellites, but also in AI models, computing infrastructure, and a global social network. This shift is evident in the figures provided by the company. Out of a total addressable market estimated at $28.5 trillion, nearly $26.5 trillion is attributed to opportunities related to artificial intelligence, far ahead of space ($370bn) or connectivity ($1.6 trillion). An Ambition That Reaches Far Beyond Earth's Orbit The projects presented to investors illustrate this new direction. Starship is intended to drastically reduce the cost of access to space in order to deploy more satellites and expand Starlink's capabilities. Even more ambitious, SpaceX plans to develop orbital data centers starting in 2028. The goal is to utilize the solar energy permanently available in space to power the growing needs of artificial intelligence. Added to this is a partnership with Tesla and Intel aimed at developing its own AI chips. Rockets, satellites, connectivity, data centers, AI models, and semiconductors: Elon Musk is progressively seeking to master the entire value chain. Ultimately, the SpaceX IPO may not be about the value of a space company. Rather, it questions Elon Musk's ability to build a global infrastructure blending space, connectivity, and artificial intelligence within a single group.

SpaceX by the numbers: Six charts mapping businesses driving its IPO ambitions

June 11 (Reuters) - SpaceX's market debut on Friday is expected to be the largest-ever IPO, capping the meteoric rise of a company that has reshaped the space business with reusable rockets and internet beamed from orbit and which now targets space-based AI. Aiming for a $1.75 trillion valuation that would instantly rank it among the world's most valuable companies, SpaceX is pitching itself as humanity's ticket to Mars. Its financials, though, show a company whose aggressive spending on computing power for AI and developing a new rocket has overwhelmed the profits from its Starlink satellite internet service. Here are six charts that illustrate its business: AI LOSSES OUTWEIGH BOOST FROM STARLINK Last year, SpaceX's sales rose 33% to $18.67 billion, with Starlink accounting for about 60% of the total thanks to its about 10.3 million users across 9,600 satellites. But merging with the money-losing xAI pushed the company to a net loss of $4.94 billion last year, from a profit of $791 million in 2024, when the explosive growth of Starlink and its reusable rocket launch business powered earnings. SPACEX'S LAUNCH CADENCE SETS IT APART FROM RIVALS SpaceX has gone from a single launch in 2006 to more than two every week, far outpacing rivals and making it the go-to launch partner for NASA and the Pentagon. Its reusable Falcon 9 has powered that surge, while the larger, still-in-development Starship is intended to carry crew and cargo on an unprecedented scale. Falcon Heavy essentially combines three Falcon 9 boosters to form one of the world's most powerful rockets. It is capable of lifting 64 metric tons to low-Earth orbit and currently launches heavy military satellites and interplanetary probes. XAI TRAILS AI RIVALS ANTHROPIC, OPENAI SpaceX's biggest addressable market, it says, is AI. In February, SpaceX acquired xAI and united two key parts of Musk's business empire. But by many measures, xAI is behind rivals Anthropic and OpenAI. A recent report from finance startup Ramp showed that more than 30% of its business customers were paying for Anthropic's and OpenAI's AI services in April, with the Claude Code creator overtaking OpenAI for the first time, while xAI's adoption remained around 5%. The data -- based on Ramp's analysis of spending by about 50,000 customers -- only captures a small slice of spending by big enterprises on AI, an area where Anthropic is believed to be the market leader. SPACEX IS RAISING FUNDS AT A PRICEY MULTIPLE Investors in the SpaceX IPO are being asked to pay a premium that dwarfs the multiples at which some of the most valuable tech companies trade. At $135 per share, SpaceX would trade at a trailing price-to-sales multiple of roughly 94 -- above companies such as Nvidia, Amazon and Meta and closer to pure-play space peers such as Planet Labs and Rocket Lab, which trade at 50.4 and 115.4, respectively, despite being younger companies. Since SpaceX generated a loss last year, it cannot be compared on a price-to-earnings ratio. STARSHIP WILL LIFT SPACEX'S LAUNCH CAPACITY The case for that premium rests partly on Starship, which is designed to be reusable and carry over 100 metric tons to low-Earth orbit, more than any other rocket flying today. This would be crucial not just to SpaceX's launch business but also to its ambitions to put AI data centers in orbit. Current SpaceX rockets, Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, can carry about 22.8 metric tons and 63.8 metric tons to low-Earth orbit, respectively. The Starship's test flight in May marked a major milestone ahead of the IPO, successfully deploying mock satellites and completing a controlled Indian Ocean splashdown despite minor engine issues. (Reporting by Anhata Rooprai and Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila) By Anhata Rooprai and Jaspreet Singh