SpaceX Prices the Largest IPO in History Tonight as Wall Street Buys Into the Launch Business

The company that turned rocket reusability from a sceptic's punchline into the backbone of the global launch market is about to become a publicly traded one. SpaceX prices its initial public offering after the markets close today, Thursday 11 June, with shares due to begin trading on the Nasdaq tomorrow under the ticker SPCX.

The numbers are without precedent. SpaceX is selling 555.6 million shares at a fixed price of 135 dollars each, raising roughly 75 billion dollars and valuing the company at about 1.75 trillion dollars. That makes it the largest stock market debut ever, comfortably ahead of Saudi Aramco's 2019 listing and more than three times the size of Alibaba, previously the biggest IPO on a US exchange. The order books closed heavily oversubscribed, with reported demand running at roughly double the stock on offer. Up to 30 percent of the shares have been set aside for retail investors, several times the usual allocation for a deal of this kind.

At that valuation, SpaceX would land among the largest companies in America, above Tesla, and would put Elon Musk at the helm of two separate trillion dollar public companies.

What investors are actually buying

For readers of this site, the more interesting question is what the prospectus reveals about the launch business itself. SpaceX filed its S-1 with three reported segments: Starlink, the satellite broadband constellation; Space, covering launch services and Starship development; and AI, the segment built around xAI following the merger of the two companies in February.

The filings show 2025 revenue of 18.67 billion dollars against a net loss of 4.94 billion dollars. Starlink is the engine, bringing in 11.4 billion dollars of revenue and 4.4 billion dollars of operating profit. The launch segment is also profitable, with its earnings effectively bankrolling Starship development. The losses sit squarely in the AI division, where xAI posted an operating loss of 6.36 billion dollars.

In other words, the launch cadence that this site tracks week in and week out is what makes the whole structure stand up. Falcon 9 has been flying at a relentless pace, including a record breaking 35th flight of a single booster on 7 June, and Starlink missions continue to dominate the global launch manifest. That operational machine is now the foundation of a public company.

A launch company priced like a tech giant

Not everyone is convinced by the price tag. Analysts at Morningstar have pegged fair value at around 780 billion dollars, less than half the IPO figure, arguing that Starlink is the only consistently profitable part of the business and that xAI is set to burn through enormous sums this year. The bullish case rests on what comes next: commercial Starship operations, direct to mobile Starlink services, and longer term ambitions such as orbital data centres.

Starship itself remains the wildcard. The vehicle is central to NASA's Artemis programme as a crewed lunar lander, and just this week the agency named the Artemis III crew who will dock with it in orbit next year. A revamped Super Heavy and Starship stack flew a test mission last Friday with only minor issues, a timely result given the scrutiny of the past few days. Turning that test programme into a revenue generating launch and lander business is the bet at the heart of the valuation.

What happens tomorrow

Because SpaceX took the unusual route of a fixed offer price rather than a marketed range, there will be no pricing drama tonight. The real price discovery happens tomorrow morning when SPCX opens for trading and the unfilled demand from the order books meets the open market. The listing also lands at the front of a queue of enormous offerings, with AI firms Anthropic and OpenAI both moving towards their own public debuts.

Whatever the share price does on day one, the milestone is hard to overstate. Twenty four years after its founding, the company that made booster landings routine, that flies more mass to orbit than the rest of the world combined, and that holds the keys to NASA's return to the Moon, now belongs partly to the public in the most literal sense.