SpaceX will be listed on Nasdaq and Nasdaq Texas today under the symbol ‘SPCX’.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX raised a record-breaking $75 billion in its initial public offering, edging out AI rivals Anthropic and OpenAI as they prepare to go public.
The parent company of X and xAI has warranted some 555.6m shares at a price of $135 a share. It will be listed on Nasdaq and Nasdaq Texas today (June 12) under the symbol ‘SPCX’.
At this price, SpaceX fetches a market value of $1.7trn, or a fully diluted value of $.18trn if employee stock options and restricted stock units are counted.
The underwriters were given an option to buy an additional 83.4m shares at the same price, which would increase the offering to around $86bn if fully exercised.
After the nomination, Musk, the company’s chairman, CEO and chief technology officer, is expected to hold more than 82pc of voting power.
Alongside Musk, a small number of firms are expected to earn tens of billions of dollars in returns from SpaceX’s IPO. Peter Thiel-led venture capital firm Founders Fund owns around 3pc of SpaceX after investing $600m in the company over its lifetime.
A source told Bloomberg that the Thiel-run VC’s stake in the company is worth more than $50bn. Andreessen Horowitz’s stake, meanwhile, is worth more than $10bn and Sequoia Capital owns about 15pc of SpaceX at a value of more than $20bn.
Musk’s biggest supporters in the retail community have put more than $100bn in orders for SpaceX stock, sources told the publication yesterday (11 June) – far exceeding the 20pc of shares (or around $15bn) reserved for them. In total, the IPO reportedly quadrupled demand for available shares.
However, only retail investors in certain countries can participate in this cycle. In Europe, that includes Germany, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Sweden. While in Japan – the only Asian country eligible for the round – the company raised $2.2bn in the largest initial share sale in Japan, surpassing JX Advanced Metals’ IPO last year.
The historic increase comes despite SpaceX posting a net loss of $4.28bn on revenue of $4.69bn for Q1, compared to a net loss of $528m on revenue of $4bn last year.
The space-tech company was last valued at a reported $1.2trn following the February acquisition of xAI, another of Musk’s companies, which is behind the AI chatbot Grok. This comes less than a year after xAI acquired social media platform X, one of Musk’s ventures.
SpaceX is the first in a series of blockbuster IPOs expected this summer. OpenAI, the developer behind ChatGPT, recently announced its intention to go public, and estimates expect the company to be valued at around $1trn. Meanwhile, Anthropic is expected to cross the $1trn mark if it goes public.
Earlier this week, Aravind Srinivas, founder and CEO of Perplexity, shared his plans to take the company public in 2028.
Srinivas told CNBC that “it’s important for the AI industry that these IPOs go well”, referring to SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI. “I think there will be dire consequences if it doesn’t go well … The SpaceX IPO this week will be a leading indicator of how Anthropic or OpenAI will pan out,” he said.
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Elon Musk in 2020. Photo: NASA/Bill Ingalls via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
