SpaceX raises $75 billion in history's largest IPO at a $1.77 trillion valuation

SpaceX began trading on Nasdaq on June 12, 2026, under the ticker symbol SPCX, completing the largest initial public offering in history. The company sold 555.6 million shares at $135 each, raising $75 billion and achieving a market valuation of $1.77 trillion — dwarfing Saudi Aramco's $29.4 billion raise in 2019, the previous record holder, as reported by CNBC.

The listing makes SpaceX the seventh-largest publicly traded company in the United States by market capitalization, placing it ahead of Tesla, which currently trades at approximately $1.6 trillion. For a company that was private just weeks ago, this is an extraordinary debut onto public markets.

A historic IPO by any measure

The $1.77 trillion valuation is not a product of speculative frenzy alone. SpaceX recorded $18.7 billion in revenue during 2025, though the company posted a net loss of $4.9 billion — a figure driven largely by Starship development costs and aggressive capital expenditure on satellite manufacturing. The profitable core of the business is Starlink, SpaceX's satellite internet division, which now serves more than 9 million subscribers worldwide and operates firmly in the black.

Still, the IPO price implies a valuation multiple of approximately 92 times trailing sales — a figure that is extraordinary even by the standards of high-growth technology companies. For context, NVIDIA, the current standard-bearer for AI infrastructure investment, trades at a fraction of that multiple. Investors buying SPCX at the IPO price are not paying for today's business; they are paying for a very specific vision of what SpaceX can become.

The Starship bet

That vision depends heavily on Starship, SpaceX's fully reusable heavy-lift rocket. Starship is the foundation of SpaceX's most ambitious plans: rapid and cost-effective access to orbit, a crewed mission to Mars, and the mass deployment of next-generation Starlink satellites. The rocket has faced a series of test flight setbacks and regulatory groundings that have delayed its operational timeline.

Full Starship reusability — catching the booster on the launch tower, refueling rapidly, and relaunching — is not yet a routine operational reality. SpaceX's business case for its $1.77 trillion valuation is, in significant part, contingent on achieving this milestone at scale. The $75 billion raised in the IPO will go toward precisely this goal: accelerating Starship development, expanding Starlink constellation density, and building the ground infrastructure to support a launch cadence the world has never seen.

What this means for the industry

SpaceX's public debut is a watershed moment for the broader space industry. For more than two decades, large-scale space infrastructure was the domain of governments and a handful of defense contractors. SpaceX's IPO demonstrates that private capital markets are now willing to assign telecommunications-scale valuations to space companies — and that the risk appetite for long-duration, capital-intensive bets has expanded significantly.

Competitors will feel the pressure. The fresh capital gives SpaceX the resources to accelerate at a pace that would be difficult for any rival to match in the near term. Amazon's Project Kuiper, the most credible competitor to Starlink, is still in early deployment. European and Asian launch providers remain years behind on reusability. SpaceX's IPO may mark not just the moment the company went public, but the moment the competitive structure of the space economy was effectively set for the decade ahead.

For Elon Musk, the IPO dramatically increases his already extraordinary net worth, given his significant ownership stake in the company. For public investors, the question is whether a 92-times-sales multiple on a company that lost nearly $5 billion last year is a reasonable price to pay for a front-row seat to what could be the defining infrastructure build-out of the 21st century.