Stock in Mr. Musk’s rocket and satellite maker closed just above $161, up more than 19 percent from its I.P.O. price.
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SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket and artificial intelligence company, capped the biggest-ever initial public offering by rising 20 percent in its trading debut on Friday, turning the world’s richest man into the first trillionaire and setting the stage for fast-growing A.I. companies to reach the stock market in a once-in-a-lifetime bonanza.
SpaceX shares opened trading at $150, up from their I.P.O. price of $135, before closing the day at $161.11. That valued the company at more than $2 trillion, exceeding the market capitalizations of other titans of American industry, including Walmart and General Motors combined.
At that size, the offering dethroned Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company, which was valued at $1.7 trillion and raised more than $29 billion when it went public in 2019. SpaceX raised $75 billion from its offering, more than the combined amount amassed by every other U.S. I.P.O. over the past two years, according to Renaissance Capital, a research and advisory firm.
The pop in SpaceX’s share price also catapulted Mr. Musk, 54, to trillionaire status. The entrepreneur, who not only leads SpaceX but also runs the electric carmaker Tesla and other businesses, has long been the planet’s wealthiest person. But passing the trillionaire milestone is significant, further augmenting Mr. Musk’s fortune and influence.
A coterie of Mr. Musk’s friends and venture capital and private investment firms were enriched by the I.P.O., many by billions of dollars. Thousands of SpaceX employees instantly became millionaires.
Mr. Musk spent Friday at the company’s Starbase headquarters in Texas, where he celebrated with employees, family, friends and investors. “It is certainly hard to believe that a little company that started in a warehouse in El Segundo is now going public,” he told them, referring to SpaceX’s founding in 2002 in Southern California. “I gave SpaceX less than a 10 percent chance of succeeding at all.”
A SpaceX spokesman and Mr. Musk did not return requests for comment.
SpaceX’s blockbuster I.P.O. paves the way for mega offerings by the A.I. start-ups OpenAI and Anthropic, which are each valued at nearly $1 trillion. Never have three trillion-dollar entities gone public in the same year. Their stock market debuts could signal that a new era of corporate power has arrived, with SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic joining the pantheon of tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, Apple, Netflix and Meta.
For SpaceX, the first day of trading capped a long road. Mr. Musk founded the company 24 years ago with the idea of making humans a multiplanetary species. For years, his dreams of private spaceflight seemed to be out of reach.
But Mr. Musk has remade the space race with partly reusable rockets and transformed communication with the company’s satellite internet service, Starlink. In February, SpaceX bought his A.I. company, xAI, which owned the social media platform X, creating a conglomerate of the tech billionaire’s various interests.
Mr. Musk has used SpaceX as a kind of piggy bank over the last two decades, securing loans from the company to himself and relying on the firm to shore up several troubled businesses in his orbit. That was enabled partly because of Mr. Musk’s iron grip on SpaceX; he controlled around 85 percent of the shareholder votes before the I.P.O. because of a class of supervoting shares and other corporate structures.
In its I.P.O., SpaceX sold more than 555 million shares, a little more than 4 percent of the company’s outstanding stock. The company and its bankers courted traditional institutional investors and encouraged wealthy individuals and retail investors to buy. Individual investors made up about 22.5 percent of the I.P.O., which was higher than usual, two people familiar with the offering said.
SpaceX also wanted several indexes to change their rules so its shares would be included faster than normal, which would eventually compel managers of large index funds to buy up the stock.
SpaceX’s stock price is expected to swing higher and lower in the weeks after its listing, not necessarily because of shifting opinions about the company but because of certain technicalities. SpaceX is expected to face high demand for its relatively low number of shares available, potentially leading to sharp price rises. That could change as investor enthusiasm dies down and more shares become available to trade.
J.P. Morgan analysts said this week that the recent average I.P.O. share price increase stood at 32 percent after the first day of trading, but fell to a loss of 26 percent after 12 months.
Daniel Hanson, a portfolio manager at the investment firm Neuberger Berman who oversees a fund with a $200 million investment in SpaceX, said the speed at which SpaceX went public — six months from when Mr. Musk first announced his intentions — was an example of its executive team’s “tenacity.”
“It’s exciting to see the team recognized by the public for what they have accomplished since their founding 24 years ago,” he said.
In recent weeks, SpaceX, which has contracts with NASA and other federal agencies, has also faced questions about its business, including its spending and how it can justify its valuation. In its I.P.O. prospectus, the company reported that it had lost more than $4.9 billion last year, compared with a $791 million profit in 2024, because of increased expenditures on A.I. Revenue was $18.7 billion last year, up 33 percent from the previous year.
In contrast, Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is valued at slightly less than SpaceX at just over $1.4 trillion, though it pulls in far more revenue and generates large profits. Last year, Meta’s revenue totaled $201 billion, and profit was $60.5 billion.
SpaceX has said it plans to use the money it raises from its I.P.O. to pay off loans and fund various moonshots, including Mr. Musk’s goals of putting A.I. data centers into orbit, building a lunar factory and eventually sending humans to Mars.
While skeptics have questioned whether these plans are feasible, Mr. Musk’s fans abound. In New York, an excited crowd of several dozen people gathered outside the Nasdaq building in Times Square on Friday morning, including Zach Boucher, 45, who flew in from California overnight to see SpaceX listed on the Nasdaq.
Mr. Boucher said he was buying more than 2,200 SpaceX shares through Wells Fargo and was “never going to sell — I’m holding for the long term.”
This moment is “like getting in on the ground floor of GE or G.M., or being here when Microsoft opened,” he said.
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and 18 other banks served as underwriters for SpaceX’s I.P.O. They were expected to earn a record $550 million in fees and have spent the last two weeks toasting Mr. Musk and his company.
At Goldman Sachs on Friday, the bank remade the lobby and cafeteria of its Manhattan offices with a space theme, replete with macaroons that looked like moon rocks and a mission control brunch with “big bang burritos.” Not to be outdone, JPMorgan and SpaceX commissioned the artist Leo Villareal to create a celestial light show atop the bank’s headquarters.
SpaceX’s celebration at Starbase was expected to continue into the night. Executives were set to address employees during a party, with least one bar on nearby South Padre Island reserved for festivities, according to a person familiar with the plans.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied the claims.)
Joe Rennison and Lauren McCarthy contributed reporting from New York.
About 25 years ago, Adeo Ressi, a former college roommate of Elon Musk’s, begged the tech entrepreneur not to start a rocket company.
Mr. Musk had just reaped millions of dollars from the sale of PayPal, which he helped create, to eBay. He and Mr. Ressi were looking at ways to send terrestrial plant life to Mars. They had a $50 million budget, but soon found it was not enough to cover the cost of a rocket. So Mr. Musk told his friend that he was going to build his own.
Mr. Ressi said he had organized a panel of space experts one day in a conference room of a hotel in Santa Monica, Calif., and brought Mr. Musk in to hear why the idea was a fool’s errand. Private spaceflight was expensive, and the economics made little sense, the dozen or so people there said. But Mr. Musk did not heed them.
“I really want to congratulate him for the incredible perseverance,” Mr. Ressi said in an interview. “For making it happen.”
Mr. Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, has come a long way since Mr. Ressi’s failed intervention. On Friday, SpaceX debuted on the stock market as the world’s largest initial public offering, a $2 trillion juggernaut that has launched hundreds of rockets into space; operates a dominant satellite internet service, Starlink; and oversees Mr. Musk’s artificial intelligence efforts and social network, X. The company’s I.P.O. was so huge that Mr. Musk became the world’s first trillionaire.
Yet SpaceX’s success was never a sure thing. Mr. Musk and his team of executives and engineers overcame numerous hurdles, solving problems as varied as the physics of rockets and the connection of multiple satellites in orbit.
Mr. Musk acknowledged how far-fetched SpaceX’s achievements were. At the company’s Starbase headquarters in Texas on Friday for the I.P.O., the 54-year-old said he had given SpaceX less than a 10 percent chance of succeeding.
“I told people this: ‘It’s probably going to fail. But we should give it a try,’” he said.
Mr. Musk’s space dreams were initially modest, and centered on sending some seeds to Mars in a small greenhouse through a venture he had started with Mr. Ressi, Life to Mars. He thought that if people on Earth saw green sprouts pushing up on Mars, they would be excited enough to push Congress to give more money to NASA.
So Mr. Musk traveled to Russia, hoping to find an old intercontinental ballistic missile that could cheaply launch the greenhouse into space. The Russians spurned him. On the flight back to the United States, Mr. Musk turned to Jim Cantrell, a space industry veteran, and a few other colleagues and said he would build one himself.
“It’s a stunning story,” said Mr. Cantrell, who became SpaceX’s fourth employee. “Now we see today what it’s become, but at the time it seemed rather inconsequential.”
In SpaceX’s early years, it alternated between eye-catching failures and resounding successes. The company’s first rocket, the Falcon 1, was small. Its first two launches, from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean, failed. SpaceX was starting to run out of money.
At that point, Mr. Musk said he would try one more time to make the rocket work, recalled Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer and a former friend of Mr. Musk’s.
The third try also failed. But Mr. Musk then said he would try again. If it failed a fourth time, he might have given up entirely, Mr. Zubrin said.
“That would have been the end of SpaceX,” he said.
In September 2008, the fourth Falcon 1 launch made it to orbit. So did a fifth nearly a year later.
By then, SpaceX had won a key contract from NASA to develop the much larger Falcon 9 rocket and the accompanying Dragon capsule to take cargo to the International Space Station. The first Falcon 9 launch, in 2010, reached orbit, as did the second six months later. In 2014, SpaceX won another major NASA contract to take astronauts, not just cargo, to the space station.
By charging less to launch satellites, SpaceX grew to dominate the rocket business. SpaceX also used its ability to launch quickly and cheaply to deploy Starlink internet satellites starting in 2019. The satellites communicate with terminals on Earth to beam high-speed internet to nearly every corner of the planet. That idea went back a couple of decades, but Starlink, now SpaceX’s biggest business, was the first to not end in bankruptcy.
Mr. Musk, who simultaneously runs the electric carmaker Tesla, also turned his attention to getting people to Mars with a spaceship large enough to carry colonists. (Sending seeds was no longer the main goal.)
In 2016, Mr. Musk revealed the initial plans for SpaceX’s biggest rocket, now known as Starship, at a meeting of the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico. Earlier that year, he said at a different conference that the company would launch a mission to Mars by 2025.
Since then, SpaceX’s test flights have included failures and hopeful progress, although almost never as quickly as Mr. Musk promises. In March 2024, he said Starship would arrive on Mars “within five years.” A year later, he said the spaceship would depart for Mars “at the end of next year.” NASA has said the best-case scenario would be humans reaching Mars in the mid-2030s.
In May, the 12th Starship test flight was largely successful, as the upper-stage spacecraft made it halfway across the world and performed the maneuvers to simulate a landing. But the booster stage malfunctioned as Starship returned to Earth, stalling future flights for now.
Even if there are future failures, Mr. Musk has stoked a generation of space enthusiasts, especially with SpaceX’s stratospheric I.P.O. this week.
“What SpaceX is doing, really, is building the infrastructure that can support and sustain this brilliant new promise of a new space economy,” said Royden D’Souza, 49, an independent journalist and podcast host in Doha, Qatar, who has focused on the cosmos for nearly three decades. “When you build a highway to space, when you build a highway to a new place, you have the potential for whole new economies to come up.”
SpaceX’s first day of trading
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTElon Musk, the chief executive of SpaceX, has dined with President Trump at the White House, lost a flashy trial where he testified against his rival Sam Altman and accompanied Mr. Trump to China for a major diplomatic summit.
Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, has had a different itinerary over the last six months. She spoke at a telecom trade show in Barcelona, Spain, to boost SpaceX’s satellite internet service, Starlink; mingled with politicians in India, a potentially large market for the company; and appeared with tech executives at the White House to pledge that their data centers would not increase energy prices for Americans.
For 24 years, Ms. Shotwell has played the adult-in-the-room foil to Mr. Musk at SpaceX. While he was advising Mr. Trump and running his other companies, such as the electric carmaker Tesla, she was singularly focused on developing SpaceX’s business as the rocket and satellite maker grew into a more than $1 trillion company.
That work — and her ultimate loyalty to Mr. Musk — has made her one of the world’s most powerful female executives, who was thrust into the spotlight as SpaceX prepared for its blockbuster initial public offering. Unlike Mr. Musk, Ms. Shotwell, 62, has long kept a low profile. She rarely posts on social media — usually in service of SpaceX, when she does — and makes just the occasional public appearance.
Perhaps her most notable trait is her ability to persist by Mr. Musk’s side for decades, even as the tech billionaire has churned through executives at his other companies. Two former SpaceX executives who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve their personal relationships used one word to describe her: “survivor.”
In a 2018 interview at a TED conference, Ms. Shotwell outlined how she handled Mr. Musk. She never told him immediately that his ambitions were impossible, she said, and she would “find ways to get that done.”
“I love working for Elon,” she said, adding later, “I always felt like my job was to take these ideas and kind of turn them into company goals — make them achievable.”
Ms. Shotwell has been handsomely rewarded for her efforts, accumulating enough SpaceX shares to make her a billionaire. Last year, she was the highest-paid executive at the company, receiving total compensation of more than $85 million, according to SpaceX’s filings.
“Elon represents the brilliant innovation and the vision, and Gwynne is the engine that keeps everything operating on schedule,” said Peter Diamandis, a SpaceX investor and the founder of the XPrize Foundation, a nonprofit that supports technological development. “It’s an incredible partnership.”
Mr. Musk, Ms. Shotwell and a SpaceX spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.
A mechanical engineer by training with a master’s degree in applied mathematics from Northwestern University, Ms. Shotwell worked at Chrysler before moving to California in the late 1980s to work at a space research nonprofit. She met Mr. Musk, a co-founder of the electronic payments firm PayPal, in 2002. After PayPal was sold to eBay that year, Mr. Musk decided to plunge some of the proceeds from the deal into a rocket start-up.
In their first meeting, Ms. Shotwell proposed that Mr. Musk hire a full-time businessperson for SpaceX. But when he asked her to join, she told him she was happy with her current job. She dithered for about a month before accepting his offer, she said in an interview on a Stanford business school podcast.
“I called him on the phone, and I said, ‘I’ve been a bleeping idiot,’” Ms. Shotwell said. She became SpaceX’s seventh employee.
SpaceX ended its first trading day nearly 20 percent higher than where it started, rising from its offering price of $135 to $161.11. That took the company’s market valuation to over $2 trillion.
Were SpaceX to immediately become part of the S&P 500 (which is not happening), it would rank as the sixth largest company in the index, behind Nvidia, Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon.
It’s been a dreamy Day 1 on the public market for SpaceX. One of the many reasons for that could be that the online brokerages that allocated stock to small investors took steps to prevent them from selling too quickly. Flippers, so to speak, will be blocked from buying into future I.P.O.s, the brokerages have said.
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTNew York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, weighed in on SpaceX’s initial public offering in a post on X that reflected a theme of his tenure. “Reason #1,000,000,000,000 why we should tax the rich,” he wrote, linking to an article about Musk becoming a trillionaire.
The banks involved in the I.P.O. are going to celebrate into the night. JPMorgan Chase is throwing a party tonight at its Park Avenue headquarters. Executives will dine on tomahawk steak from custom mirrored buffets meant to reflect the day’s the theme. The festivities will include a “Dessert in the Stars” cocktail reception. Capping off the night, the bank will flick on a celestial light show atop the bank’s headquarters commissioned from the artist Leo Villareal.
A SpaceX filing early Friday revealed that Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley would receive about 20 percent of the roughly $500 million fee pool. But that is actually quite low. Some bankers said they were gobsmacked that SpaceX and Musk whittled the banks down to a fee of about 0.7 percent of the offering size. And those financial firms were required to buy expensive subscriptions to Grok, xAI’s chatbot, just to be a part of the I.P.O.
The halo effect of being around Musk, however, is apparently worth it on Wall Street.
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTWith just minutes left until the close of trading, it’s been a remarkably smooth first day for the world’s largest I.P.O. It’s also an interesting moment to remember that SpaceX basically ripped up the I.P.O. playbook. SpaceX skipped the traditional weekslong dance between the company, its bankers and investors to pinpoint a price. SpaceX simply chose a price and a number of shares last week. It’s too early to say whether other companies will follow this pattern, but it’s been a winning formula for SpaceX.
How much money did Wall Street make on the deal? SpaceX shed some light in a filing early Friday morning. The company’s lead bankers, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, will receive about 20 percent of the roughly $500 million fee pool. That means they will each pocket around $100 million.
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I’ve spent 32 years saving as much as I reasonably could and taking whatever the market would give me in index funds or similar investments, and it has worked so far.
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You probably have your own line items. Practice those lines.
Congratulations to the SpaceX welders and mariners and coders. Hats off and good luck to the individual investors who are playing the SpaceX lottery.
But I’m rooting especially hard for the JOMO crowd. There can be joy, too, in missing out – and thinking about all of the other ways that you’re winning.
One person who has yet to comment on the SpaceX I.P.O.? President Trump, who loves to weigh in on anything and everything on his social media platform, Truth Social.
Trump, who follows the stock market closely, might still say something amid all the mania. During a period last year when Tesla’s stock was struggling, Trump memorably vowed to buy a Tesla “as a show of confidence and support for Elon Musk, a truly great American.” That comment preceded a boost in Tesla’s stock price. Trump and Musk have had a complicated relationship, but are now generally on good terms.
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTOne thing people on Wall Street are telling me today is they are surprised, and in some cases relieved, at how unexpectedly boring it is. The largest I.P.O. in history, in a volatile industry, with a mercurial founder, has largely gone off without a hitch. That’s good news for the banks working on the deal and Nasdaq, the exchange hosting it.
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 to 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.)
A SpaceX initial public offering has long been anticipated by Wall Street, but the actual deal came together quite quickly given its size. SpaceX interviewed bankers this past December and it spent the next six months getting ready and talking to investors. It has now completed the largest ever I.P.O. There have been other deals that have gotten done as quickly, but never one as large as SpaceX, because there’s never been a deal this big.
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTHow much will the SpaceX I.P.O. matter for regular investors? Probably not as much as you might think, according to The Upshot’s new calculator.
We built a tool to estimate how much SpaceX stock you may soon own if you already invest in index funds, a popular method for everyday investors and 401(k) accounts. Prices could significantly change in the coming days, but we found that for someone with $50,000 in an U.S. total stock index fund, they’d own less than $60 in SpaceX stock (compared to over $700 in Tesla).
In January, SpaceX granted Elon Musk, its founder and chief executive, a pay package that eventually totaled 1.3 billion restricted shares. The award was contingent on the rocket company’s establishing a colony on Mars with one million inhabitants and launching high-powered data centers into space.
Mr. Musk has not achieved those goals. Even so, he can vote those 1.3 billion shares in shareholder decisions, according to SpaceX’s offering prospectus, which was released on May 27. In other words, the company is allowing Mr. Musk to vote with shares he has not yet earned.
“I have never heard of this,” said Ann Lipton, a law professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “He basically found a way to hack the normal rules of corporate organization.”
The restricted shares weren’t the only unusual corporate governance arrangement that SpaceX revealed as it prepared for its initial public offering, the largest ever. The company, which builds rockets and operates the Starlink satellite internet service, valued itself at more than $1.25 trillion before the I.P.O., which is likely to create a bonanza for Wall Street, Silicon Valley and, of course, Mr. Musk.
Among the atypical arrangements, SpaceX does not plan to have the majority of its board be independent directors. It added that it would not use a committee of independent board members to determine executive compensation, as most companies do. And its governing documents say any shareholder claims under federal securities law must be resolved through arbitration.
All of these moves appear to benefit one person: Mr. Musk.
For now, at least, executives at Anthropic and OpenAI can breathe a sigh of relief. Advisers to both companies have been concerned that a troubled listing of SpaceX, particularly one where retail investors lost money, could make investors more wary of buying into the artificial intelligence start-ups’ upcoming I.P.O.s.
Instead, public market investors have assigned a much higher valuation to SpaceX than where it was last valued privately earlier this year. So far, SpaceX is a positive signal for the next two big I.P.O.s.
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTIt’s been a mixed day for other companies tied to SpaceX. Moog, which makes hardware used in rockets and satellites, is down 1.2 percent, but remains over 60 percent higher since the start of the year. Redwire, which makes infrastructure for the space industry, fell almost 10 percent, and is down 40 percent from its recent peak at the end of May. Still, the stock has doubled in value since the start of the year.
SpaceX is making history with the largest I.P.O. ever, raising double Saudi Aramco’s previous record when adjusted for inflation.
These are the 100 largest I.P.O.s since 1995
SpaceX is the largest I.P.O. in history.
Saudi Aramco held the previous record when it went public in 2019.
Tesla shares barely budged Friday, rising less than 1 percent in midday trading. Some analysts had expected the shares to fall as investors sold Tesla and used the proceeds to buy SpaceX.
Still, Tesla shares are down 9 percent since late May and 19 percent since their high point in December.
SpaceX stock remains a little shy of 30 percent higher than its $135 offering price at around $170. The stock has been trading between $170 and $175 for roughly the past hour.
That’s broadly in line with other mega-cap I.P.O.s. Both Microsoft and Apple rose a little over 30 percent when they went public in the 1980s. The big difference is that when they went public, those companies were not worth the trillions of dollars they are now. SpaceX Is already being valued at around $2 trillion.
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTA small group of protesters gathered outside the headquarters of JPMorgan Chase during a “Stop Funding Billionaires” rally.
Elon Musk has laid out hundreds of goals over the years for what he plans to achieve at his businesses.
Mr. Musk, 54, has said his rocket company, SpaceX, will build a colony of humans on Mars. He has said that Tesla, his electric carmaker, will incorporate fully autonomous driving abilities into all of its cars. And he has promised to show that humanoid robots made by Tesla are dexterous enough to thread a needle.
Ahead of SpaceX’s initial public offering, The New York Times analyzed statements that Mr. Musk has made about his businesses on social media or during investor calls over the last 15 years. He delivered only some of what he said he would, when he said he would, the analysis found.
Of more than 600 claims Mr. Musk has made …
Strikingly, Mr. Musk’s annual rate of success declined over time, even as he made more promises. Of the 13 goals he declared in 2015, he later achieved nearly three-quarters of them, The Times found. But of the 27 claims he made in 2020, fewer than half have been accomplished on time. Some still have deadlines far in the future.
Mr. Musk’s ability to follow through on what he says is increasingly in the spotlight with SpaceX’s I.P.O. The billionaire has major ambitions for the company, which operates rocket launches and the Starlink satellite internet service, as well as artificial intelligence efforts and the social media platform X.
Many chief executives overpromise and underdeliver. But Mr. Musk is a singular figure in the business world, and what he says carries extra weight. Investors typically bet on him specifically, based on his record of disrupting industries such as cars and rockets. At Tesla, where Mr. Musk serves as chief executive and owns about 20 percent of shares, the company’s $1.3 trillion market capitalization relies largely on his future plans, according to analyst estimates.
“The market is trading and selling on what he is saying,” Sky Moore, a corporate lawyer who has reviewed Tesla’s financial filings, said of Mr. Musk.
About 150 of Mr. Musk’s goals over the years were about SpaceX, The Times found. Of those, about 32 percent were achieved within one year of their stated goal, while 19 percent were more than a year late or remained unfulfilled. Half of the goals could not be verified because the plans were too vague or the date was too far out.
Investors looking to leverage their SpaceX bets will soon have a way by using exchange traded funds, investment vehicles that trade on public exchanges as single stocks. More than a dozen so-called leveraged E.T.F.s, which borrow against a market bet to amplify the size of their return, connected to SpaceX have been filed.
Many financial experts consider the investment vehicles uniquely risky because they are designed to be used only for short-term trades. Nonetheless, they have proven especially popular with Musk fans, who have poured billions into leveraged Tesla E.T.F.s.
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTElon Musk posted nearly 500 times on his social media site, X, over the past week as he prepared to take SpaceX public.
In the run-up to SpaceX’s initial public offering, Mr. Musk shared promotional content encouraging investors to buy shares. But he also continued to post about politics, race and the culture wars — signature topics of his round-the-clock social media feed.
Mr. Musk opined on a Monday knife attack in Belfast, where police arrested and charged a Sudanese man in connection with the assault. The incident has become a focus for anti-immigration groups.
Mr. Musk reposted messages from Restore Britain, a far-right political party, saying that Britain has “an immigration problem” and that the party would “reverse the third-worldification” of the country.
“Only by protesting REPEATEDLY and LOUDLY will there be any change!!” Mr. Musk posted about the attack. Mr. Musk’s posts and reposts drove mass attention to the incident, according to research from a nonprofit focused on combating online hate speech called the Center for Countering Digital Hate, generating more than 64 million views on content about the attack.
Mr. Musk posted all of these messages as he successfully pursued making SpaceX’s initial public offering the largest in the world. Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, often behaves this way, posting on social media nonstop even as he becomes embroiled in trials, undertakes diplomatic missions and runs some of the biggest companies in the world.
Mr. Musk’s online posting habit has also landed the tech mogul in hot water. In 2018, Mr. Musk and his electric vehicle company, Tesla, each paid fines of $20 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission for online posts in which Mr. Musk falsely claimed he had secured funding to take Tesla private. In 2023, advertisers decamped from X after Mr. Musk endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory in a post.
This year, a jury determined that Mr. Musk had misled investors in his social media company with his online posts and could owe them roughly $2.5 billion in damages.
Over the past week, Mr. Musk reposted messages calling for mass deportation and saying that immigration would destroy Western societies, mixed in with reposts about how high SpaceX’s valuation ought to be.
Mr. Musk also engaged with those posting conspiracies about the mayoral race in Los Angeles. The “level of fraud here is mind-blowing” in the vote count, in which a progressive candidate pulled ahead of a Republican, he said.
He also criticized California’s policy against requiring identification from voters. “California made it illegal for any election in the state to require ID. This is nuts,” he posted.
One X user questioned why Mr. Musk spent his time focused on culture wars instead of enjoying his wealth.
“Nothing else matters if civilization falls,” Mr. Musk responded.
Feeling left out because you didn’t get any shares? Consider what Katy Song, a former technology banker, has been telling her financial planning clients in recent weeks.
“I show them their goals and put price tags on those goals,” Song said. “In none of these cases is someone going to sell 100 percent of their rollover I.R.A. and buy SpaceX.” Now, her query: “When you said you wanted security and safety, do you think investing directly in SpaceX is going to feel that way?”
They can usually answer that one for themselves.
Even though SpaceX is going public and allowing essentially anyone to own a part of the company, Elon Musk has ensured his voice is the only one that matters. He controls more than 82 percent of the shareholder votes in the company, in part due to his large ownership of supervoting shares, which grant him 10 votes for every share, and other corporate agreements.
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTEarlier this year, the leaders of the world’s largest stock indexes found themselves in a pickle.
SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket maker, had told them that it planned an initial public offering in the summer. The company said it wanted to be included in the top indexes — which are composed of a variety of public companies and act as a barometer of the broader stock market — shortly after going public, two people familiar with the process said.
It was a big ask. Most indexes, like the Nasdaq-100, do not add companies until at least a year after they go public to protect index funds — the widely used investment vehicles that track the indexes — from trading volatility. If SpaceX was included faster than normal, it would compel large index funds run by giants like Fidelity and Vanguard to buy millions of SpaceX shares practically overnight. While that could boost SpaceX’s share price, it could expose index fund investors to more risk.
But missing out on the biggest I.P.O. in history, in a year when other sizable offerings are also expected, was too much for Wall Street to bear, the two people said. Nasdaq, the exchange where SpaceX plans to list its stock, announced a rule change in May to allow “fast entry” into the Nasdaq-100 index by large private companies like SpaceX that go public.
Others followed. FTSE Russell, the London-based index provider, recently altered its methodology, which will result in listing SpaceX in its indexes within a week of its going public.
The changes mean a large swath of index funds — which millions of Americans own in their retirement funds, pension plans and personal portfolios — are poised to hold SpaceX shares soon after the company goes public. Anthropic and OpenAI, the artificial intelligence start-ups that are planning to go public this year, would also land in index funds quickly, potentially exposing everyday investors to more financial risk whether they like it or not.
“It’s historically unprecedented,” said John Polonis, a former Wall Street lawyer who worked at J.P. Morgan and now offers financial analysis on social media. “You can try to reorient your retirement accounts to avoid funds invested in A.I. companies, but most people aren’t going to be doing that. They’re kind of left out in the dust here.”
The changes by the indexes are just one way that Mr. Musk, 54, has upended I.P.O. norms. The tech mogul has bet that investors cannot resist a deal as enticing as SpaceX, the juggernaut behind the Starlink satellite internet service, private rocket launches and, most recently, artificial general intelligence research. The sheer size of his company — it is now valued at $1.77 trillion, larger than Meta — has given Mr. Musk the power to demand onerous terms from those who seek a windfall from its stock market debut.
Among them: Mr. Musk has required Wall Street banks, law firms, auditors and other advisers working on the I.P.O. to buy subscriptions to Grok, his A.I. chatbot, which is part of SpaceX. And last week, he did not set a price range for the offering, as most companies going public would, providing just one share price — $135 — for buyers to take or leave.
One index provider has declined to budge. Standard & Poor’s said it would not change its criteria for inclusion in the S&P 500, one of the most-followed indexes, meaning SpaceX will not be eligible for inclusion until at least mid-2027. Standard & Poor’s said it had determined that exceptions to its rules “should not be granted solely based on market capitalization.”
The back-to-back-to-back round of massive public offerings that began this week is going to make a select group of employees of three technology firms very, very rich.
SpaceX, the rocket and artificial intelligence company, said on Thursday it had raised about $75 billion from its offering, putting its valuation at $1.77 trillion. Anthropic, the A.I. start-up that makes the Claude chatbot, and its ChatGPT-making rival, OpenAI, have also both filed to go public soon. Each of those companies has an estimated valuation approaching $1 trillion.
The mega-listings are projected to create over 20 new billionaires from the companies’ ranks of current and former employees, according to an analysis for The New York Times by Sacra, a private markets research company.
They will have access to publicly traded shares that can more easily be turned into very real spending power. (At least, they will at the conclusion of lockup periods, during which company insiders are not allowed to sell their shares.)
That includes Gwynne Shotwell, the longtime SpaceX chief operating officer who controls a stake in the company projected to be worth under $2 billion.
And when Anthropic and OpenAI go public, billionaires at those firms will eventually have mountains of public shares available to sell. That list will include people like Greg Brockman, the Open AI co-founder and president, who testified in a trial last month that his shares in the A.I. start-up were worth $30 billion. And Dario Amodei, the Anthropic co-founder and chief executive, has a net worth already estimated at about $8 billion.
“The magnitude of wealth creation is unprecedented,” said Marcelo Ballvé, Sacra’s head of research.
Sacra previously predicted that the three I.P.O.s could create more than 16,000 millionaires. Minting these new millionaires could lead to inflated real estate prices in already expensive markets like the Bay Area, higher demand for luxury goods like private planes and greater investments back into the start-up ecosystem.
But the rise of the new billionaires could have much grander impacts on society. That group could lead a rash of new mega-philanthropy and political giving. Or they could buy private islands and sports franchises.
Not to mention Elon Musk, already the world’s richest man, who became a trillionaire on Friday.
To make the projections, Sacra analyzed the wealth distribution from previous large tech I.P.O.s. It then analyzed SpaceX’s I.P.O. documents and conducted simulations of Anthropic and OpenAI’s expected public offerings.
The analysis included only current and former employees, not any new billionaires created among outside investors in the companies.
Each of the companies would rank among the world’s largest ever public listings, competing only with the I.P.O. of the Saudi oil company Aramco in 2019, which went public at a $1.7 trillion valuation.
The sudden boom of billionaire wealth stems in part from the companies waiting so long to go public, Mr. Ballvé said.
Sheryl Sandberg, the former chief operating officer at Facebook, held 0.07 percent of the company’s stock in 2012 when it went public valued at $104 billion, Mr. Ballvé said. That minted her a $73 million equity stake.
But what would the same percentage stake come out to at the much-loftier valuation for SpaceX, which has been private for 24 years? That would be worth $1.2 billion, Mr. Ballvé said.
“That’s what happens when you get an I.P.O. that is 17 Facebooks,” he added.
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTSKIP ADVERTISEMENTSKIP ADVERTISEMENTSKIP ADVERTISEMENTSKIP ADVERTISEMENTSpaceX’s blockbuster initial public offering hit a valuation of $1.77 trillion on Thursday. But Mr. Musk and his investment bankers’ lofty propositions about what the company, which makes rockets and develops artificial intelligence, will achieve, coupled with Mr. Musk’s history of overpromising, have some investors increasingly worried that SpaceX may burn them.
“It really does feel very much a ‘don’t look at the man behind the curtain’ situation,” said Jim Chanos, the founder of the investment firm Chanos and Company, who predicted the 2001 collapse of Enron, the energy company that was found to have engaged in accounting fraud.
Mr. Chanos and others said they were concerned with SpaceX’s finances. The company lost $4.3 billion in the first three months of the year alone and is spending heavily on A.I. development. Revenue was $4.7 billion and growing, but it was far lower than that of tech giants like Meta, which brought in $56.3 billion in the same period and has a stock market valuation of $1.4 trillion.
At the same time, SpaceX has promised that its total addressable market — its revenue opportunity if it captures all the demand across its various industries — is the largest “in human history” at $28.5 trillion. The figure, which depends on SpaceX proving that it can put A.I. data centers in space and develop factories on the moon, dwarfs China’s annual gross domestic product by more than $8 trillion.
Michael Burry, a hedge fund investor featured in the book “The Big Short” for his predictions of the 2008 financial crisis, said in a Substack discussion last month that any increase in SpaceX’s stock after its I.P.O. would “be on hype and technicals.”
“Nothing in that S-1 suggests it is worth $1 trillion let alone $2 trillion,” Mr. Burry wrote, referring to the company’s I.P.O. filing.
Even some SpaceX shareholders have doubts. Ross Gerber, the chief executive of Gerber Kawasaki, an investment firm that owns SpaceX stock, said the company’s projections reminded him of unverified information that young start-ups used to woo investors. He said he was alarmed by SpaceX’s likely valuation of $1.77 trillion, which would be more than four times the $400 billion that the company was valued at just 13 months ago.
“Investors are paying an extremely high price for this stock,” Mr. Gerber said.
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