SPCX Opens at $150, Closes at $161 — and Wall Street Has Never Seen Anything Like It
SpaceX hit the Nasdaq floor on Friday morning at $150 per share — an 11% premium above its already historic $135 IPO price — and never looked back. By the close of trading on June 12, 2026, the stock had settled at $160.95, a 19% first-day gain that handed early shareholders roughly $14 billion in paper profit before the opening bell had finished echoing. Behind the tape sat a number that dwarfed everything before it: a market capitalization above $2 trillion on the back of a $75 billion offering, the largest initial public offering in the history of capital markets.
Saudi Aramco held that record for seven years after its $25.6 billion — later expanded to $29.4 billion with overallotment — debut in December 2019. SpaceX didn't edge past the mark; it lapped it by a factor of more than two.
The Playbook Behind the Pricing
The clean first-day performance was not accidental. Axios reported Friday that SpaceX and lead IPO banker Goldman Sachs had been holding investor education sessions since January — months before the company formally filed its S-1. The strategy paid off in an unusually smooth book-build. "There was an incredible focus on educating investors very early, given the breadth and complexity of the company," a source familiar with the process told Axios. "And it also seemed to be announcing major things on a weekly basis — like the xAI and Cursor acquisitions, or the Anthropic and Google compute deals — so the dialogue was constant."
The result was that SpaceX was able to go to market with a fixed "take it or leave it" price of $135 rather than the auction format standard in U.S. IPOs. That approach kept volatility down on the first day and, according to Axios, is now seen as a template that both Anthropic and OpenAI — which filed its own S-1 on June 8 — are likely to replicate when they go public later this year.
What Investors Actually Bought
The prospectus SpaceX filed tells a company in two very different financial orbits. Starlink, the satellite broadband division, generated $11.387 billion in 2025 revenue and $4.423 billion in operating profit, making it profitable, growing fast, and the clear financial engine of the enterprise. The division has surpassed 10.3 million subscribers and is expanding into maritime, aviation, and enterprise verticals. Revenue across the whole company rose 33% to $18.67 billion in 2025, up from $14.1 billion in 2024.
The other orbit belongs to xAI, the Grok developer that Elon Musk merged into SpaceX in an all-stock transaction in February 2026. The AI unit burned through $6.36 billion in operating losses in 2025, dragging the combined entity to a net loss of $4.94 billion for the year. By the end of the first quarter of 2026, SpaceX reported a net loss of $4.27 billion — compared with $528 million in the same period the prior year — and an accumulated deficit of $41.3 billion.
Bulls point to contracted revenue that did not exist six months ago: Anthropic signed a deal in May to pay SpaceX $1.25 billion per month to rent the full output of the Colossus 1 data center through May 2029. Google followed the week before the IPO with a $920 million-per-month agreement for 32 months of xAI GPU capacity. Combined, those two contracts put annualized compute revenue at roughly $26 billion. Bears, meanwhile, note that both contracts include 90-day termination clauses after December 2026 and that Google has publicly described its arrangement as bridge capacity rather than a permanent commitment.
The Valuation Question Hanging Over the Tape
At $1.75 trillion, SpaceX entered the public market priced at approximately 94 times its 2025 annual revenue. Nvidia, one of the most richly valued technology companies on earth, trades at less than a quarter of that multiple. Morningstar assigned a fair value of $780 billion to SpaceX in its pre-IPO analysis — less than half the IPO valuation — and described Goldman Sachs's own modeling as implying that SpaceX would need revenues exceeding $100 billion by 2030, a compound annual growth rate above 40%, to justify the $135 price.
Governance adds another layer of complexity. Musk's Class B super-voting shares give him approximately 85% of voting power, meaning outside shareholders have near-zero influence over corporate decisions. Denmark's AkademikerPension pension fund blacklisted the stock ahead of listing, calling the governance structure "catastrophic." Texas incorporation limits derivative lawsuit rights to shareholders holding at least 3% of shares — a threshold effectively no individual investor can reach.
The public float is deliberately thin. Only about 4% of total shares — roughly 555.6 million Class A shares — were sold in the offering, with reports indicating that more than 75% of the $75 billion was pre-allocated to existing investors and insiders. That scarcity helped fuel Friday's pop but also means the market cap is being set by a tiny fraction of the company's equity.
Why the AI IPO Wave Is Now Watching SPCX
The relevance of SPCX to the AI sector extends well beyond SpaceX's xAI ownership. The SPCX debut is now the clearest signal the market has sent about how it will price AI-adjacent companies at scale — and both Anthropic and OpenAI are reading it carefully.
Anthropic filed its own S-1 on June 1 and is targeting an October listing. OpenAI followed on June 8. Both are watching whether the index machinery accelerates into SPCX or whether first-day euphoria gives way to the kind of post-IPO drift that Jay Ritter, the University of Florida finance professor long known as "Mr. IPO," documented across 2012–2021 IPOs: an average 23.6% first-day gain that compressed to just 10.6% cumulative return over the following three years.
MSCI fast-tracked SPCX for index inclusion as early as June 13 — the morning after the IPO. Nasdaq-100 eligibility is expected to arrive around July 7, at which point analysts estimate between $22 billion and $27 billion in passive inflows would be triggered as index-tracking funds absorb the stock. The S&P 500, however, blocked a fast-track inclusion, meaning the broader benchmark's forced-buying wave will come later and on a slower timeline.
The template SpaceX has set — fixed pricing, long investor-education runway, AI infrastructure as a revenue bridge, and a controlled float — is now the working model for what promises to be the most consequential IPO season in a generation.
What to Watch Next
Three dates will define SPCX's near-term story: the Nasdaq-100 rebalancing around July 7, when passive buying pressure arrives in earnest; the December 2026 window when both the Google and Anthropic compute contracts become terminable on 90 days' notice, a test of whether contracted AI revenue is as durable as bulls believe; and whenever Anthropic and OpenAI set their own roadshow calendars. If SPCX is still trading above its IPO price by then, pricing expectations for those two offerings will be set accordingly. If the stock has reverted toward Morningstar's $780 billion fair value estimate, the AI IPO window may narrow faster than anyone is currently pricing in.
"There was an incredible focus on educating investors very early, given the breadth and complexity of the company. And it also seemed to be announcing major things on a weekly basis — like the xAI and Cursor acquisitions, or the Anthropic and Google compute deals — so the dialogue was constant."— Source familiar with the IPO, As reported by Axios