SpaceX made history on Friday with the largest initial public offering (IPO) ever, raising $75 billion and achieving a valuation of $1.77 trillion. Ahead of the Nasdaq opening bell, SpaceX’s founder and CEO Elon Musk reflected on the company’s humble beginnings. Musk acknowledged that he had little confidence in its chances of survival when it was founded in 2002 in a warehouse in El Segundo, California.
“I gave SpaceX less than a 10% chance of succeeding at all,” he said. Musk added that it was “certainly hard to believe” that a company that started in a small warehouse would one day launch the world’s largest IPO.
Joking about the scale of its success, he said that if someone had predicted such an outcome in the early days, his response would have been, “Man, you must be smoking some really good crack.”
‘SpaceX wants to take you to the moon’
Speaking from SpaceX headquarters in Starbase, Texas, Musk addressed employees and investors, emphasizing the company’s ambitions to make space travel a reality for ordinary people.
“SpaceX wants to be able to take you to the moon,” Musk said. “I am confident at this point that with the incredible team that we have here at SpaceX, that we will do that for you,” he added.
The billionaire entrepreneur said the company’s ultimate mission extends far beyond commercial launches and satellite services. “That’s what SpaceX is all about: to take the fiction out of science fiction,” he said, referring to plans that include future missions to the Moon, Mars and beyond.
SpaceX shares opened at $150 on Friday, giving the stock an 11% gain over its $135 IPO price. However, the opening price came in below earlier indications of interest, which had suggested the stock could begin trading around $175. That level was more than 14% higher than the eventual opening price.
Historic listing
The listing eclipses the previous IPO record set by Saudi Aramco, which raised $25.6 billion in 2019 at a valuation of $1.71 trillion.
At $1.77 trillion, SpaceX immediately becomes the sixth-most valuable company in the United States and the seventh-most valuable globally, surpassing Meta and Tesla. The company reported a net loss of $4.9 billion in 2025 on revenue of $18.7 billion, with most of its income generated by its satellite internet business, Starlink.