SpaceX’s IPO will be the largest ever at a share price of $135

Elon Musk’s rocket and artificial intelligence maker SpaceX priced its initial public offering on Wednesday at $135, which would value it at $1.77 trillion and crown it the biggest IPO ever.

At that price, SpaceX would get $74.4 billion from the offering, and its valuation would be more than 40 percent higher than the $1.25 trillion it valued itself at in February. The current IPO record is held by Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state oil company, which was valued at $1.7 trillion and raised more than $29 billion when it went public in 2019.

Most companies that go public set a preliminary price range for their stock offering before deciding on a final number in case investor demand for their stock changes. But Mr. Musk and SpaceX avoided that and simply declared one price for investors. SpaceX could still change that price, but is not expected to do so. It is likely to begin trading on the Nasdaq next week under the ticker symbol SPCX.

With $74.4 billion raised, SpaceX’s IPO would be about “more than every USIPO combined in the last two years,” said Matthew Kennedy, chief IPO market strategist at Renaissance Capital.

A SpaceX spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

SpaceX’s IPO is a contribution to other expected offerings that will be huge, including artificial intelligence companies OpenAI and Anthropic. Antropic confidentially said it would go public on Monday, and OpenAI is expected to file in the coming weeks. Both startups have valuations approaching $1 trillion. The three offerings could unleash an avalanche of wealth across Silicon Valley and Wall Street, creating new corporate titans.

Among the biggest winners would be Mr. Musk, 54, who is already the world’s richest man. At $135 a share, the roughly 50 percent stake in SpaceX it controls would be worth just over $752 billion. (Mr. Musk cannot sell some of the SpaceX stock he controls until the company reaches various operational milestones, according to company filings.)

A big rise in the company’s share price in its first days of trading could make Mr Musk the world’s first billionaire.

Mr. Musk, who founded SpaceX in 2002, revamped the space race with partially reusable rockets and transformed communications with the company’s Starlink satellite Internet service. In February, SpaceX bought his artificial intelligence company xAI, which owned his social media platform X, creating a conglomerate of the tech billionaire’s various interests. Mr. Musk independently manages the electric car manufacturer Tesla, as well as other companies.

Over the past two decades, he has used SpaceX as a sort of piggy bank, securing loans from the company and relying on the company to back several struggling businesses in his orbit. This was made possible in part by Mr. Musk’s iron grip on SpaceX. According to company filings, he controls more than 85 percent of its shareholder votes due to a class of high-voting shares.

SpaceX, which has contracts with NASA and other federal agencies, has long been a financial mystery. Last month, the company revealed a full picture of its financial health for the first time in an IPO prospectus. The company reported a loss of more than $4.9 billion last year, compared to a profit of $791 million in 2024 due to increased spending on AI. Revenue was $18.7 billion last year, up 33 percent from the previous year.

The company plans to use the money raised from the IPO to fund various moonshots, including Mr. Musk’s goals of putting AI data centers in orbit, building a lunar factory and eventually sending humans to Mars.

(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, alleging copyright infringement on news content related to AI systems. Both companies denied the claims.)

Nicolas Owens, an equity researcher at investment research firm Morningstar, said that while SpaceX’s IPO was huge, he wouldn’t be surprised if “records were broken more than once.” Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have become bigger than ever before they went public.

“Trillion dollar market capitalization for a company going public used to be unheard of,” he said, using the term to describe the company’s valuation. “It looks normal now.

Lauren Hirsch and Maureen Farrell contributed reporting from New York.