SpaceX soars 23% in Wall Street debut and makes Elon Musk the first trillionaire

NEW YORK (AP) - Shares of SpaceX soared 23% in their Wall Street debut on Friday, making the rocket maker's CEO Elon Musk the first-ever trillionaire.

The shares opened at $150 and kept rising, reaching $166.90 around 12:.20 p.m. ET. That price gave the company a market value of $2.18 trillion. Forbes is now estimating Musk's net worth at $1.1 trillion.

Institutional and retail investors jumped at the opportunity to buy 555.6 million shares of SpaceX at the offering price of $135 apiece. The $75 billion in proceeds easily topped the previous record IPO from oil giant Saudi Aramco in 2019.

Musk says SpaceX is going public now because it needs money to fund its ambitions of putting satellites and data centers in space and eventually establishing a colony of people on Mars.

Musk earlier marked the opening of trading on Nasdaq, where the company's are trading under the symbol "SPCX," by joining a ceremonial bell ringing from Starbase, the South Texas home of SpaceX.

He reiterated his lofty goals "to make life multi-planetary."

"Not just a few astronauts, I mean literally you," Musk said. "Whoever you are watching this, SpaceX wants to be able to take you to the moon, take you to Mars and ultimately beyond."

Known for his technology breakthroughs, as well as wild claims and missed deadlines, Musk was widely expected to break the trillion dollar mark despite SpaceX generating losses as big as its ambitions.

In addition to establishing a one-million person Martian colony, the company has promised to save humanity by establishing other outposts in space, launch data centers the size of football fields into orbit and outdo rivals Anthropic and OpenAI in the race to make money from artificial intelligence.

To reach its goals, SpaceX needs billions more than it currently takes in from its rocket and satellite business. Between the start of 2025 and March 31, 2026, the company lost $8.7 billion.

Wall Street bankers that helped take SpaceX public are enthusiastic about the company - and the big fees they will earn - but not everyone thinks the stock price is justified.

Analysts at research firm Morningstar, which doesn't earn any investment banking fees, wrote that the IPO is "significantly overvalued" because of SpaceX's unproven technology and massive capital needs.

They estimate the company is only worth $780 billion - less than half its IPO value.

Still, Musk has pulled off the seemingly impossible before.

The trillionaire - on paper at least - made his fortune by creating two companies, Zip2 and PayPal, that netted him about $200 million at sale. He used that money to start SpaceX and invest in Tesla, and defied the odds by creating a space company that figured out how to reuse rockets and a car company that made electric vehicles cool.

Musk has realized vast sums of wealth for himself, much of it in stock he has yet to cash in or grants for shares he'll only receive if Tesla or SpaceX hit ambitious performance targets. His recent pay package from Tesla drew criticism from the Vatican. At Tesla, he's worried shareholders by fighting with regulators or dividing his attention between multiple companies and last year by taking a role in the Trump administration.

But a rising stock price has cured all ills: Since it went public in 2010, Tesla has returned 20,000% for shareholders, or more than $1.2 trillion in investor wealth. That has helped lift Musk's pre-SpaceX IPO worth to $795 billion, according to Forbes magazine.

SpaceX is the first of three "megacap" companies expected to go public this year, with Anthropic and OpenAI to follow. Nasdaq even revised its rules to allow SpaceX to gain entry into funds tied to its indexes in 15 days, which means investors will end up buying the rocket maker's shares much earlier.

Not all investors are thrilled about SpaceX potentially showing up in their holdings of index funds. Officials from pension funds for firefighters, teachers and other workers in California and New York sent a letter to SpaceX last month decrying some of the provisions in its IPO, including the "super voting shares," mandatory arbitration of shareholder claims instead of the possibility of lawsuits and how much power Musk will hold over the company.

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AP reporters Stan Choe and Wyatte Grantham-Philips contributed from New York.