SpaceX IPO raises $75 billion in biggest debut of all time

The company raised $75 billion in the IPO, pricing 555.6 million shares at $135 each, according to a statement on its website Thursday. SpaceX’s IPO is more than double the size of Saudi Aramco’s $29.4 billion listing in 2019.
Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as it is officially known, has given the underwriting banks an over-allotment option to buy an additional 83.3 million shares at the IPO price, the statement shows, whiSpaceX has made history with the biggest-ever IPO, sending it into the top ranks of the largest public companies and putting founder Elon Musk on the verge of becoming the world’s ch would increase the size of the deal to about $86 billion if fully exercised. The IPO drew demand for more than four times the available shares, Bloomberg News reported.
At the IPO price, SpaceX has a market value of $1.77 trillion. Accounting for employee stock options and restricted share units, the pricing gives it a fully diluted valuation of about $1.8 trillion.
Musk’s fan base in the retail trading community is a crucial component of the deal. They have placed more than $100 billion in orders for the stock, people familiar with the matter said on Thursday, far more than the 20% of shares that had been reserved for them.
Not everyone is so excited. Veteran short-seller James Chanos on Wednesday called it “a hopes-and-dreams IPO” driven by enthusiasm for Musk and artificial intelligence rather than the fundamentals of a company that has yet to post a profit.
Still, coupled with rule changes that could fast track the stock into benchmark gauges like the Nasdaq-100 Index, demand from passive funds and retail investors unable to buy at the IPO price should set the stage for a solid cohort of buyers for shares of the rocket, satellite and AI company once they start trading.
“It’s probably the most hopeful IPO,” said Kim Forrest, chief investment officer at Bokeh Capital Partners, adding that she doesn’t buy IPOs. Buyers of SpaceX “want to be part of the future,” she said. “And I think that’s oddly hopeful in this time when we’re moving between the poles of greed and fear.” SpaceX is the first of three major IPOs expected to capitalise on stock investors’ appetite for the leading AI companies, a seemingly insatiable demand that has propelled benchmark US indexes to records this year despite the acceleration in inflation and economic disruption caused by the war in Iran. Anthropic PBC and OpenAI, two of the company’s AI competitors, are expected to go public as soon as this year and could seek valuations of more than $1 trillion each, so the performance of SpaceX’s stock will be as closely scrutinized by Silicon Valley venture capitalists as it is by Wall Street traders.