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SpaceX began trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol SPCX this afternoon. Within hours, it achieved two historic milestones: it completed the largest initial public offering (IPO) in financial history and made Elon Musk, 54, the first person ever to hold a personal net worth of $1 trillion.
The stock opened at $150 per share, above its IPO price of $135, and surged as high as $176.52 during trading, a gain of more than 30% on its first day. As of the time of writing, SPCX is trading at around $171, giving SpaceX a market capitalisation of $2.237 trillion.
That puts it sixth among the most valuable companies on earth, behind only Nvidia ($4.969T), Alphabet ($4.390T), Apple ($4.279T), Microsoft ($2.881T), and Amazon ($2.550T), all companies that took decades to reach their valuations. SpaceX got there on day one.
The IPO raised $75 billion, more than double the previous record set by Saudi Aramco in 2019. For context: Aramco’s $29 billion offering was considered so large at the time that it reshaped how Wall Street thought about IPOs. SpaceX has just made that figure look modest.
Before today, Elon Musk was already the world’s richest person, worth an estimated $813 billion according to Forbes. The second-richest person on earth, Google co-founder Larry Page, was worth $288 billion. That gap, roughly $525 billion between first and second place, was already the widest in modern history.
It has now grown beyond comprehension.
Musk owns roughly 38% of SpaceX shares and options, now valued at approximately $765 billion. Add his roughly 15% stake in Tesla, valued at $276 billion, plus his holdings in X, xAI, Neuralink, and The Boring Company, and Forbes now estimates his net worth at $1.1 trillion.
The second-richest person in the world is worth around $290 billion. The gap between Musk and everyone else is larger than the entire net worth of Jeff Bezos, Bernard Arnault, Mark Zuckerberg, and Warren Buffett combined.
To grasp what a trillion dollars actually means: a billion dollars is enough to spend $27,000 every day for 100 years. A trillion dollars is $27 million per day for a century. Nigeria’s entire GDP in 2025 was approximately $363 billion. Musk’s personal wealth is now more than three times the size of Nigeria’s entire economy.
Musk founded SpaceX in 2002. He nearly lost everything in 2008, when both SpaceX and Tesla were days from bankruptcy. He survived by splitting his last $20 million between the two companies. In the eighteen years since, he has built a rocket company that is now more valuable than every car manufacturer in the world combined.
SpaceX went public on the back of Starlink, its satellite internet business, which is already live in Nigeria and across Sub-Saharan Africa, providing broadband to communities without ground-based infrastructure. Starlink remains the company’s only profitable segment, generating steady subscription revenue that funds SpaceX’s more ambitious projects, including Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built, currently being developed to carry humans to Mars.
One analyst, CFRA’s Keith Snyder, has already initiated coverage of SPCX with a rare Sell rating and a $115 price target, below the IPO price, citing what he describes as a disconnection between the company’s current earnings and its valuation.
Read also: The SpaceX IPO isn’t draining crypto liquidity: Why the market has it wrong
SpaceX reported a net loss of $4.94 billion in 2025. Morningstar has valued the company at $780 billion, less than half the IPO price. For investors getting in today, that gap is the central risk.
But the market, at least for now, has answered. The cheers heard at the Nasdaq in New York when the opening bell rang this morning were audible from the street. SpaceX’s Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell rang the bell herself.
Whether the stock holds these levels or pulls back as analysts’ warnings begin to land, the events of today do not change. The largest IPO in history happened. The world’s first trillionaire was made. And a rocket company founded by one man with $100 million and a near-obsessive belief that humanity must become multi-planetary is now the sixth most valuable business on earth.
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