SpaceX has gone public in the biggest stock market listing ever, and the numbers that followed pushed Elon Musk past a mark no one had reached before. The shares opened on the Nasdaq at $150 and closed their first day even higher, taking his stake and his other holdings, Tesla among them, past one trillion dollars. The listing, run by president Gwynne Shotwell and chief financial officer Bret Johnsen, beat the previous record set by Saudi Aramco and left Jeff Bezos far behind, ending a climb that started with a small software sale.
Friday’s opening bell on the Nasdaq answered a question people had been asking for years. Space Exploration Technologies Corp, trading under the ticker SPCX, had set its price at $135 a share on Thursday evening and started trading the next morning at $150. The shares rose above $160 during the day and finished at $161, a gain of about 19 per cent, which lifted the company’s value past $2 trillion at its high point.
The result was a personal fortune of around $1.1 trillion for Elon Musk, the first time anyone has reached that figure. His holding in the rocket and satellite company, added to his Tesla shares and a range of other interests, crossed the line as soon as trading began. Most of the gain was on paper, but the size of it was enough to reshuffle the top of the global wealth rankings in one day.
The record
The company sold 555.6 million shares and raised close to $75 billion at the start, a figure that rose to about $85.7 billion once the banks took up extra stock they were entitled to. Either way, this was the largest stock market listing ever, with a value near $1.77 trillion that put the business above Tesla and among the most valuable listed companies in the world.
Next to the old records, the lead was wide. Saudi Aramco raised $29.4 billion when it went public in 2019, and Alibaba’s 2014 listing, long seen as the American record, brought in $25 billion. SpaceX raised about three times that last figure. Buyers wanted far more stock than was on offer, with orders running four times higher than the shares available and small investors alone asking for more than $100 billion, well above the fifth of the sale kept aside for them. All of this came for a company that still loses money, priced on what people think it can become.
the road to the launchpad
Musk was born in Pretoria in June of 1971 and left South Africa at seventeen for Queen’s University in Canada, then moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where he took degrees in economics and physics. His first business, the city-guide software firm Zip2, was set up in 1995 with his brother Kimbal and £21,000 from their father, Errol. Compaq bought it in 1999 for $307 million, and he came away with $22 million.
He put the money into the online payments startup X.com, which became PayPal and was bought by eBay in 2002. That sale left him with about $180 million, enough to fund the two companies that would shape the years ahead. He started the rocket firm the same year, a plan many thought unlikely at the time, and one that used up much of his early fortune before it earned anything back.
Engineering the business
The company’s story can be read as a run of firsts. Its Falcon 1 reached orbit in 2008, the first privately built liquid-fuelled rocket to manage it. The bigger Falcon 9 flew in 2010, and that December the Dragon capsule became the first commercial spacecraft to reach orbit and return safely, followed in 2012 by the first private docking with the International Space Station.
The change that altered the costs came in December 2015, when a Falcon 9 booster landed upright after dropping off its load, which made rockets reusable and brought down the price of reaching orbit. A Falcon Heavy carried a Tesla Roadster into space in 2018, Starlink launches began in 2019, and in 2020 the Crew Dragon flew NASA astronauts to the station, the first crewed trip to orbit run by a private firm. The satellite internet service has since grown to more than nine million users worldwide by the end of 2025, up from 4.6 million a year before, and the company now handles about 85 per cent of all American orbital launches. It has made money on a cash basis since around 2015, and is raising funds for a stage that includes tens of thousands more satellites and plans for data centres in orbit.
Fortunes built
The wealth grew across several companies at the same time. Tesla went public in 2010 and became the most valuable carmaker in the world; the social network now called X was bought for $44 billion in 2022; and in February this year the rocket company bought the artificial intelligence firm xAI in a deal worth about $250 billion, bringing the Grok models and the X platform under the same roof.
The rise up the wealth rankings was slow at first and then quick. Musk first appeared on the global billionaires list in 2012 with a $2 billion fortune, in 634th place. He reached the top of the list in January 2021 as Tesla’s shares rose and he passed Jeff Bezos, became the first person worth $400 billion in December 2024, went past half a trillion later that year and $600 to $700 billion by the end of 2025, then crossed $800 billion in February as the xAI deal took effect. His Tesla salary is still zero, with all his pay tied to hitting set targets. Control of the newly listed company is held through two classes of shares, with Class B stock carrying ten votes each against one for the public Class A stock, leaving him with around 85 per cent of the voting power.
The listing made thousands of new millionaires, with about 4,400 current and former staff holding stock built up over their years at the company. Musk cannot sell his own holding for more than a year, a rule that suggests he wants the market to judge the business on how it performs rather than on any worry about insiders selling. The price of a stake this large is likely to be a bumpy ride, since it can move by tens of billions in a single trading day.