SpaceX made history with a $75 billion fundraising round, becoming one of the world's most valuable publicly listed companies.
According to Zhitong Finance APP, $SpaceX (SPCX.US)$With a fundraising scale of $75 billion, it has made history and become one of the world’s most valuable publicly listed companies. Now, this integrated enterprise in rockets, satellites, and artificial intelligence must earn market recognition. Friday’s debut trading day will be a critical test for the company—valued at $1.8 trillion—and its founder, Elon Musk.
Despite setting a record for the largest IPO in history, SpaceX still needs the market to endorse its ambitious vision—dominating AI and sending humans to the Moon and Mars—as well as its controversial governance structure, which grants Musk near-absolute control.
“Scaling up is extremely costly,” said Gwynne Shotwell, President of SpaceX, in an interview. “What we’re doing requires enormous investment.” She added that even as a public company, SpaceX would remain focused on long-term objectives rather than short-term quarterly performance.
The market widely expects SpaceX shares to surge significantly after listing. Signals regarding its opening price range will emerge following the 9:30 a.m. ET opening in New York. Off-exchange gray market activity has already priced in a red-hot debut, signaling a gain of at least 35%.
According to reports, the IPO received more than four times oversubscription. SpaceX adopted a rare fixed-price and fixed-size offering strategy, preventing underwriters from fully capturing the surge in demand. As a result, many potential buyers had to compete for limited allocations—a dynamic likely to fuel a sharp rally on the first day of trading.
Nevertheless, SpaceX’s unprecedented offering size has complicated market dynamics. Management undoubtedly remains wary of unexpected glitches like those seen during Facebook’s IPO in 2012. The stock’s performance on its debut will not only set the tone for its subsequent trajectory but also directly influence the prospects of mega-IPOs by its AI rivals Anthropic and OpenAI.
“This signals the arrival of a wave of IPOs,” John Waldron, President of Goldman Sachs, said in an interview. “As AI infrastructure is being built out, capital markets are willing to finance these extraordinary companies.”
The outcome of this offering will also determine whether Musk can become the world’s first trillion-dollar billionaire—a title still just out of reach. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Musk’s net worth stood at approximately $970 billion as of Thursday.
Among investors who did not receive full allocations, retail participants were particularly active. Retail subscription orders exceeded $100 billion in total, with the majority of demand left unfulfilled. Another major driver comes from index-tracking funds. It is estimated that because SpaceX is expected to be swiftly included in benchmark indices, index funds will be compelled to buy shares, generating up to $6 billion in forced buying demand.
Mega-IPOs Do Not Guarantee First-Day Success; Extremely Limited Free Float Raises Concerns Over Unlock Risk
However, a large IPO does not guarantee strong first-day performance. Fragile sentiment surrounding new listings means some stocks break below their offering price on day one and never recover. Even among companies that surge after listing, many fail to sustain their gains.
Market-compiled data show that among U.S. IPOs raising more than $1 billion, the record for first-day gain is held by design software company Figma—which rose 250% on its 2025 debut day but subsequently gave back all of those gains and now trades approximately 41% below its IPO price. Circle Internet Group, a stablecoin firm that also went public in 2025, gained 168% on its first day and currently remains slightly above its IPO price.
According to a Trivariate Research report from last year, companies reporting net losses underperformed their profitable peers by more than 10% within 18 months of listing. SpaceX posted a net loss of $4.28 billion in the first quarter of 2026.
Part of the post-listing share price volatility stems from the limited number of tradable shares. Even by conventional standards, SpaceX’s IPO was an extreme case—only about 4.2% of its total shares were freely tradable on the first day of listing.
A small float can cause significant price swings, but what concerns the market even more is the broader impact when the so-called 'lock-up period' expires and insiders are permitted to sell additional shares.
“For me, the tricky part is how the market will gradually absorb the selling pressure as locked-up shares become available,” said Jeremiah Buckley, portfolio manager at Janus Henderson Investors. “I don’t think absorbing a $75 billion IPO on its own is particularly concerning, but if we’re talking about digesting trillions of dollars’ worth of unlocked shares, that money has to come from somewhere else—and that worries me more.”
$Tesla (TSLA.US)$Merger Expectations: Market Focus
SpaceX’s early performance is likely to play an outsized role in what many investors view as Elon Musk’s endgame—merging it with Tesla to create the long-discussed 'Elon Empire.' Such a move would allow investors to gain exposure to the CEO’s entire vision—including robotics, autonomous vehicles, AI, and space-based data centers—through a single stock.
“There’s no doubt that there are synergies between Tesla and SpaceX in the future,” said Shotwell. “But my immediate priority right now is ensuring the company runs smoothly.”
Although no formal announcement has been made, reports in January indicated that investors had already pushed the company to consider a merger between SpaceX and Tesla prior to the public disclosure of the xAI deal. Early investor Peter Diamandis stated in May that a merger following SpaceX’s IPO was only a matter of time.
The operations of the two companies are already deeply intertwined. In the fourth quarter of 2025, nearly one-fifth of the Cybertrucks sold by Tesla went to SpaceX or other companies owned by Musk. Some of Musk’s most ambitious projects—such as Terafab, aimed at producing AI semiconductors—will require tens of billions of dollars in combined investment from Tesla and SpaceX before they become operational.
In a report issued Wednesday, analyst Steve Mann noted that a merger between Tesla and SpaceX remains far from certain in the near to medium term. 'The Terafab chip project, the Macrohard software development initiative, and any role Tesla might play in space exploration will all take several years to yield tangible results.'
Morningstar analysts, meanwhile, believe that if SpaceX’s share price retreats in the coming weeks, it could actually make a merger more attractive to Tesla shareholders. 'Given the sharp run-up in SpaceX’s pre-IPO valuation, we question whether Tesla shareholders would be willing to acquire SpaceX at a valuation multiple significantly higher than their own.'
On Tuesday, they stated, 'While we expect some Tesla shareholders will also be eager to become shareholders of SpaceX, newly minted public shareholders of SpaceX are unlikely to agree to a merger on terms that represent a significant discount to the IPO price unless SpaceX’s stock price falls close to our fair value estimate of $63 per share.'
With Wall Street already issuing target prices for SpaceX—reaching as high as $190 per share—the debate over Musk’s vision of 'making humanity a multiplanetary species' is about to begin in earnest.
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup, and JPMorgan are leading the offering, with an additional 18 banks participating in the underwriting. The company will list on Friday on both the Nasdaq Global Select Market and the Nasdaq Texas Market under the ticker symbol 'SPCX.'
Editor/Deng