SpaceX IPO: SPCX stock rises 19% in its first day of trading, cementing Musk as the first-ever trillionaire

Jake Paul shared a screenshot on X showing a purchase of 70,000 SpaceX shares at the IPO price of $135.

"My SpaceX public position," Paul wrote, congratulating Elon Musk and his family office manager, Jared Birchall.

Paul said he had previously invested in SpaceX through private funding rounds and was "excited to dive deeper into the IPO" alongside entrepreneur Geoffrey Woo.

Elon Musk, now the world's first trillionaire, is famous for demanding absolute loyalty. SpaceX's market debut proves that he also pays it back in dividends, minting a new class of billionaires who invested in the company early.

The second biggest winner in today's IPO behind Musk is Antonio Gracias, a member of Musk's inner circle and an early SpaceX investor. At the opening price, Gracias and his investors' stake was worth more than $75 billion.

Luke Nosek, a PayPal veteran and longtime Musk supporter, held shares worth about $5 billion.

Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX's president and chief operating officer, joined the company in 2002 and has been one of Musk's most important lieutenants. Her stake was worth nearly $2 billion at the offering price.

Bret Johnsen, who joined as chief financial officer in 2011, held shares worth roughly $1.4 billion at the open. Other VC investors include Founders Fund and Sequoia Capital.

It's been a record-breaking IPO, and now there's a new first: Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon has broken a more than 12-year silence on X to congratulate SpaceX.

"We are excited as SpaceX enters this new chapter of its journey as a public company, and we look forward to supporting their mission of advancing the frontier of human space exploration," wrote Solomon on the SpaceX-owned social media site.

Goldman Sachs is the lead underwriter for SpaceX's IPO, alongside Morgan Stanley.

AI researcher and author Gary Marcus says he's steering clear of SpaceX's newly public stock.

The former head of Uber AI Labs shared his reasoning in an X post shortly before the trading debut of Musk's rocket company.

"For those wondering: I am not buying SpaceX. I am not shorting SpaceX. I am staying the F away," Marcus wrote. "Why? Because the 'float' is so thin, it's easy to manipulate the stock. (If you don't know what that means, you are definitely in for a ride.)"

Less than 5% of SpaceX's outstanding shares were included in the public float. Low-float stocks are typically more volatile than those with larger floats.

"I want no part of it," Marcus added.

Tom Mueller, Musk's first employee at SpaceX, said the rocket company's Nasdaq debut will deliver a "very life-changing" windfall for workers.

"Elon always said that your salary is one thing, but it's the equity that's going to be worth something. And we are all like, 'Yeah, okay, someday,'" Mueller said on Fox Business' "The Claman Countdown," adding, "That day is here. It's great."

Mueller, the founder and CEO of the Impulse Space startup, helped Musk set up SpaceX in 2002 and spent 18 years with the company before he left.

The first SpaceX hire said that he would host his own party Friday morning in California to celebrate the company going public.

"We're going to ring our own bell and celebrate with a bunch of early SpaceX employees," Mueller said.

Retail traders wasted no time loading up on SpaceX stock once trading kicked off.

Everyday investors poured nearly $20 million into the shares in the first 20 minutes of trading, according to Vanda Research, which tracks retail flows into single stocks and ETFs.

That puts SpaceX just behind Nvidia for the day. It's an impressive stat given that Nvidia and other stocks started trading three hours earlier when the market opened at 9:30 a.m. ET.

"At this pace of activity, SPCX will not only top the leaderboard of the most bought stock by retail today — it's on track to hit some records relative to other major IPOs in recent times," Vanda said.

Talk about a lucrative side hustle.

In 2015, Google invested around $900 million in SpaceX for a stake of around 7.64%, which was then valued at $12 billion.

Now that position is worth $132 billion in SpaceX's first hour of trading, making it one of the best venture investments of all time.

Aside from just the paper gains, Google's investment has also been a strategic advantage, as SpaceX has used Google Cloud to power Starlink. Google also agreed last week to pay SpaceX $920 million a month for compute capacity on xAI data centers.

As big a win as SpaceX is for Google, it could see an even bigger payday later this year. Google owns around 14% of Anthropic, which is planning a blockbuster IPO of its own.

If you're waiting in line to buy SpaceX today on the stock market — don't, says the top investor for a wealth advisory firm that manages $99 billion in client assets.

"The worst thing investors can do is buy it on the first day," Don Calcagni, CIO of Mercer Advisors, told Business Insider, explaining that "the pent-up demand" and "FOMO" will factor heavily into its stock price.

If you buy the stock today at $175 in a secondary market transaction, you've "just funded all of the spectacular returns of earlier investors," Calcagni said.

"We joke that investors don't want an IPO allocation, they want a time machine," Calcagni said.

However, if you're deadset on buying today, be prepared to hold the stock for the long term, he said. Anyone buying on the secondary market today, looking to make a "windfall" by "quickly flipping" the stock, is likely to be disappointed if you look at the performance of other landmark IPOs.

Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia Capital who is a close confidant of Elon Musk, said in an interview on CNBC that he understands some of SpaceX's revenue projections look "crazy" but he will never sell the shares he personally owns.

Sequoia first invested in SpaceX in 2020, according to its website.

"I'm going to hold my shares forever," Maguire said, adding Sequoia would sell if "we feel like the valuation is way ahead of its skis."

Maguire compared where SpaceX is now to where Nvidia was three years ago.

When asked about SpaceX's projection of a $22.7 trillion market for enterprise applications, Maguire used the analogy of the earliest days of building railroads to describe Starship.

"I know it sounds crazy, but we're entering a new era," he said. "People are underappreciating how much infrastructure is going to be built into how much easier it is to access energy in space."

"I think he's very misunderstood across the board. I want people to know him," SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell said on CNBC Friday.

"In fact, he participated in some of the discussions that we had over the last couple of weeks with investors and the investors left saying 'I had no idea that that is the man,' and I said, 'That is the man I've worked for for 24 years, I love him.'"

Shotwell added that Musk's focus on retail investors "embodies a lot of what he is trying to do, he is trying to make space open for everybody." SpaceX has allocated up to 30% of its shares sold at the IPO for retail investors.

SpaceX shares look set to pop when they open later today.

Several outlets are reporting the indicative range, which is where traders see the first trade opening, is roughly between $170 and $175. That would mark a roughly 25% to 30% increase from the $135 IPO price.

It's early and plenty could happen before the first trade actually occurs. But if it were to open in that range, that type of increase is often considered a sweet spot for IPOs. The increase isn't too much of a pop where bankers are viewed as leaving money on the table. It also wouldn't be a drop, which would typically generate negative publicity.

Stocks were slightly higher before SpaceX's market debut on Friday. The week has seen wild swings as traders digested updates on the Iran war and as the tech trade stumbled amid a brutal chip sell-off.

Here's where major indexes stood around 10:30 a.m. ET:

• S&P 500: 7,412.22, up 0.24%
• Dow Jones Industrial Average: 51,063.73, up 0.42% (+214.98 points)

• Nasdaq 100: 29,526.40, up 0.27%

While fans wait for Musk outside the Nasdaq, he's at SpaceX HQ in Texas speaking to workers.

"It is hard to believe that a little company that started in a warehouse in El Segundo is going public in the largest IPO ever," he told staffers gathered at the office. "If people had told me this was going to happen, I'd be like, you must be smoking some really good crack. I gave SpaceX less than a 10% chance of succeeding at all."

"We want to be able to take anyone who wants to go to the moon, to Mars, or anywhere in the solar system — or maybe beyond the solar system at some point — we want to be able to take you there. Not just a few astronauts, I mean you, literally you- whoever you are watching this, SpaceX wants to take you to the moon, to Mars, and ultimately beyond," he said.

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, thinks SpaceX's mega IPO is a bust.

In a Friday blog, titled "Elon Musk, Human Ponzi Scheme," he wrote that despite Musk's successful endeavors — like Tesla's EVs and Starlink — the majority of his wealth rests "mainly on self-fulfilling faith." He cited Musk's missed self-driving-car deadlines and the financing for his acquisition of Twitter (now X).

"The SpaceX IPO now in progress makes it clearer than ever that Musk's greatest skill isn't developing futuristic products. It's his mastery of financial shell games and his ability to leverage insider influence, especially his influence with the Trump administration," Krugman said.

Krugman also criticized recent rule changes from the Nasdaq 100 and FTSE Russell to allow mega-IPOs like SpaceX earlier access to major stock indexes. He said it meant passive investors would be "dragged, willy-nilly, into fueling the Musk juggernaut."

The Nasdaq begins trading at 9:30 a.m. ET, but don't expect to see an immediate spike in either direction for SpaceX's share price.

Rather than trading normally right away, the shares will enter an auction period to determine a fair opening price. That can be either higher or lower than the $135 shares were priced at on Thursday evening.

"During the auction, no one can buy or sell in the normal way. Once the auction completes, the shares will begin trading continuously, and you will be able to buy or sell," Matthew Davies, an investment writer at financial services firm Hargreaves Lansdown, noted in the company's blog.

As well as the rocket "like" animation we flagged earlier, X has added another new function for the SpaceX IPO. Searching for "SpaceX" in X's search bar brings up the company's stock ticker, SPCX, and shows the opening price of $135, as well as its daily percentage change — 0% right now.

The feature appears to be for SpaceX only at the moment, as searches for other publicly traded companies like Tesla, Nvidia, and Goldman Sachs did not yield the ticker icon.

It isn't clear whether this is a feature that will be rolled out more widely or a one-off for SpaceX.

A big news event in 2026 can mean only one thing: memes.

Many posts on X this morning are poking fun at the high likelihood that Elon Musk becomes history's first trillionaire by market close on Friday, while others are joking about the scores of SpaceX staff who are about to get very, very rich.

Wall Street has been abuzz with excitement for SpaceX's record-breaking listing, but not everyone is feeling the hype.

Reuters reported on Thursday that a group of state comptrollers and pension funds had written to the Nasdaq and FTSE Russell stock indexes, asking them to pause new rule changes that would allow SpaceX and other major IPOs to join the indexes early.

The signers, including New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli and New York City Comptroller Mark Levine, said SpaceX's debut risks creating intense volatility that could affect other investors.

The signatories manage large retirement funds that could become exposed to SpaceX shares through index funds — whether they like it or not.

In her CNBC interview, Gwynne Shotwell, the company's president and COO, said that because of its lofty, interplanetary goals, SpaceX won't be focusing on short-term financial success, and that anyone who invests should accept that.

"I hope the folks that do decide to invest in SpaceX take a look at our history and see how we do operate and become comfortable with the way we operate, right," she told CNBC's Morgan Brennan.

"Our horizons are very long-term. I do not want to focus on quarterly earnings."

"I'm not saying we're not going to do right by our investors, but what folks that invest in SpaceX, SpaceXAI, need to know is that what we're doing is very futuristic, and we should be thinking about the future as well as the current quarter."

Investors who secure SpaceX shares will need to read the small print before selling.

Brokerages typically impose strict penalties on shareholders who attempt to quickly resell or "flip" their shares in the days after newly public companies begin trading. For SpaceX's IPO, Fidelity requires investors to hold their shares for at least 15 days before selling, with share flippers facing a minimum six-month ban from future IPO allocations and repeat offenders risking a permanent suspension.

Robinhood, E-Trade, and SoFi are also enforcing a 30-day moratorium on investors reselling their SpaceX shares, while the latter also charges a $50 fee for sales within the first 120 days of trading.

In an interview aired on CNBC early this morning, Shotwell — Musk's right-hand woman at the rocket firm — said that until fairly recently, it wasn't a certainty that SpaceX would ever go public, but that demand from regular people pushed the company to list.

"I wasn't sure we would go public; having a private company was important to us early on because we were so focused on the long-term outlook for the company," she told CNBC from SpaceX's Texas home, Starbase.

"We've gotten so many of the building blocks completed for so many of these different business areas, it actually feels like the right time," she added.

"We've been feeling over the last few years a lot of pressure from everyday Americans, and our friends have wanted to buy stock, and there was just no way for them to get in. Unfortunately, probably some got scammed, but there was no way to buy SpaceX stock. And it feels like a company that people should be able to own a piece of."

A $25 billion pension fund has decided not to invest in SpaceX.

Anders Schelde, chief investment officer of Denmark's AkademikerPension, told Bloomberg TV that "the price is too high, and that implies obvious financial risk," adding that weak governance standards further amplify those concerns.

Schelde said the fund's internal analysis could not justify a valuation above $1 trillion, and warned that there is "a certain amount of hype" in SpaceX and technology valuations more broadly.

It's hard not to draw comparisons between SpaceX and Palantir, the AI and data analytics company that's now valued at over $300 billion. With today's IPO, both now offer investors a chance to get into a commercial company with a lucrative national security business.

The fortunes of other defense contractors have typically been tied to their ability to make and deliver material goods, such as fighter jets and tanks. SpaceX and Palantir, however, provide the infrastructure for the US military's frontier technologies.

Still, their books are balanced far differently. Palantir's filings said it earned $687 million from government revenue in Q1 2026, more than its $595 million from the commercial sector. SpaceX, meanwhile, has said that only a fifth of its revenue comes from the US government.

As Earth's premier rocket-slinging company, SpaceX is poised to be a central pillar in the Pentagon's ambitions for space. The firm has already been selected to build the Space Force's communications backbone and a satellite network that tracks missile and aircraft threats.

Its military contracts amount to about $8 billion — small compared to giants like Lockheed Martin's $194 billion in contracts. But the US has its sights on new blockbuster space projects, such as the Golden Dome, that would eventually need someone to launch hundreds more assets into orbit.

SpaceX has positioned itself as a prime candidate. In its IPO filing, it said it conducted 11 of 12 of the US' National Security Space Launch medium- and heavy-lift missions in 2025.

In an article on X, Musk megafan Chamath Palihapitiya noted three "prizes" that space can unlock and that SpaceX can tap into.

First, the billionaire wrote that SpaceX's Starlink offers a level of connectivity that physical cables cannot. Next, space is a powerhouse for compute because of access to abundant solar power. And lastly, it's a reserve for critical minerals essential for AI.

"The rare earth elements that AI chips and energy storage depend on are largely controlled by China," Palihapitiya wrote on X. "The Moon and the asteroid belt hold reserves that dwarf anything on Earth, outside any single country's supply chain."

Dan Niles, whose firm manages about $185 million, said that SpaceX's lofty valuation makes the stock too expensive for his liking.

"He makes these incredible claims. He always misses the timeline he lays out those claims, but he eventually gets there," Niles said on CNBC on Friday. "But I think at 90 times revenue, you're asking for a lot if you own the stock beyond these index ads."

SpaceX isn't the only option if you want to be part of the AI play, he said.

"Instead of buying SpaceX at 90 times revenues with revenue growth in the most recent quarter at 15%, you could go buy Nvidia with revenue growth of 80%," Niles said.

Those who second-guess Musk should think twice, said tech guru Peter Diamandis.

"I've watched Elon build SpaceX from a rented warehouse in El Segundo to a $1.75 trillion valuation. Every expert said it was impossible — too expensive, too risky, government would never allow it," he wrote on X on Thursday. "Today it prices for the largest IPO in history."

"Never bet against Elon! Some lessons cost real money to learn," he added.

SpaceX's record-breaking IPO could trigger a reshuffling across tech stocks as investors jostle to buy into Elon Musk's space empire. "Tesla — long traded as a Musk proxy — faces rotation risk as investors gain direct SpaceX exposure for the first time," IG market analyst Fabien Yip wrote in a note on Friday.

Yip also cautioned that SpaceX's $1.8 trillion listing valuation rests on expectations rather than current earnings. Starlink is the company's only profitable business segment, and the full company lost $4.94 billion in 2025 — but many tech companies go public while still operating at a loss.

"Investors are not buying today's fundamentals — they are paying for exponential future growth," she wrote.

Talk about a lucrative side hustle.

In 2015, Google invested around $900 million in SpaceX for a stake of around 7%, which was then valued at $12 billion.

Now that position could be worth over $100 billion once SpaceX goes public, making it one of the best venture investments of all time.

Aside from just the paper gains, Google's investment has also been a strategic advantage, as SpaceX has used Google Cloud to power Starlink. Google also agreed last week to pay SpaceX $920 million a month for compute capacity on xAI data centers.

As big a win as SpaceX is for Google, it could see an even bigger payday later this year. Google owns around 14% of Anthropic, which is planning a blockbuster IPO of its own.

Steve Eisman, a former Wall Street trader who famously bet against the US housing market in 2008, chronicled in "The Big Short," recently told CNBC that he's 'not a fan' of the SpaceX IPO, citing significant concerns about the company's high valuation and other concerning elements he found in its S-1 filing.

"I think what is probably most important in the prospectus is how capital-intensive SpaceX has become," he noted. "If you go back to fiscal year 2023 and you compare revenue to capex, capex was only 42% of revenue, and in the most recent first quarter, it was 215% of revenue."

Eisman attributed the capex surge to the significant AI buildout in which SpaceX has attempted to pivot toward branding itself as an AI services and infrastructure company as opposed to a more pure-play space tech firm.

The SpaceX IPO — which is the biggest holding in investor Cathie Wood's $1 billion internal venture fund — could become the clearest vindication of an investing style hyper-focused on "disruptive" technologies and little else.

The ARK Venture fund first bought into the company in late 2023, filings show, when the company was valued at under $200 billion. It added to its position in 2025 and gained additional exposure through its stake in xAI, which merged with the rocket ship company earlier this year. SpaceX's IPO is targeted for a $1.75 trillion valuation.

The fund's other top holdings, OpenAI and Anthropic, are also expected to follow SpaceX into the public markets, potentially providing another windfall for the manager and its backers.

SpaceX is likely the first IPO that is so big that it can't fail.

Several major index providers, which control where trillions of dollars of passively managed flows, have tweaked their rules so the company can be brought into the fold faster than ever, providing IPO backers with an institutional backstop.

Nasdaq changed its rules so SpaceX could enter the Nasdaq 100 index in 15 trading days rather than three months. Inclusion in the FTSE Russell 1000 could come as soon as five days after trading begins, thanks to a late-May revision. An outlier here is that the S&P Dow Jones Indices declined to amend its rules to allow faster-than-usual entry into the S&P 500.

"The only thing PMs at the classic anchor investors have to figure out is if they want to be underweight or overweight the company," one banker said. "They'll be invested either way."

In a typical IPO, bank underwriters go on a tour of meetings with fund managers in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and other cities to pitch the company and get a sense of what the final offer price should be before the big day.

Of course, nothing about SpaceX is usual. There was no flashy hotel presentation to mutual fund managers, but it did upload a 17-minute pitch to a custom website.

The rocket-making firm set a price of $135 per share before the process instead of a range. That signaled that the lead-up to the IPO would be much more about going through the motions than actual valuation work by investors, one banker on the deal told Business Insider.

Wedbush analyst Dan Ives called SpaceX's IPO a key moment for the space industry and AI trade. The perennial tech bull said the IPO has already affected tech trading as investors sell other stocks to make room for SpaceX shares, with institutional interest being particularly strong, pointing to large orders from BlackRock and sovereign wealth funds.

Looking beyond the IPO, Ives reiterated his view that SpaceX and Tesla could eventually merge, assigning an "80%+" probability to a combination of Musk's companies by 2027.

"Musk wants to own and control more of the AI ecosystem and step by step the holy grail could be combining SpaceX and Tesla in some way to give the connected tissue between both disruptive tech stalwarts looking to lead the AI Revolution in this next tech chapter for the market."

Morningstar wasn't shy about its skepticism on SpaceX before Thursday's debut, saying it should be valued around 50% below its IPO valuation.

The firm gave SpaceX a 7% chance of capturing a "moonshot" 21% share of the global compute market through its plan to launch AI data centers into space. The most likely scenario, the firm said, is that it captures around 4% of global market share.

"Even giving SpaceX the benefit of the doubt in several key forecasts, only the most optimistic 'moonshot' scenario approaches the IPO offering price," the firm wrote earlier this week.

Morningstar's Nicolas Owens and Suryansh Sharma say long-term investors would be better off waiting to buy the stock.

"In the months following the IPO, when successive tranches of stock held by private investors and employees are slated for sale into the public market, selling pressure may weigh on the shares," the analysts wrote.

In the weeks before the IPO, we asked investing pros whether they'd buy the SpaceX IPO on day one.

A couple of them, including Altug Dincturk, the chief investment officer at Madison Partners, gave data-driven answers as to why they'd stay away. Historically, stocks have suffered in the months following their IPOs.

While University of Florida data from 1980-2024 shows an average gain of 19% on the first day of trading after an IPO, Nasdaq data from 2010-2020 shows that 64% of stocks underperform the market by at least 10% over the three years following their IPO. Around half post negative absolute returns in their first 12 months.

"High-profile names are often the worst offenders. Look at 2025 alone: StubHub debuted 8% above its IPO price on day one and has since fallen 40%," Dincturk told Business Insider. "CoreWeave opened below its offer price but is up 78% for patient investors who weren't scared off by the first-day dip. The lesson isn't 'don't buy SpaceX.' The lesson is: the opening bell is the worst time to decide."

Dincturk said his firm will wait for the dust to settle after the IPO to decide whether to buy.

After Elon Musk, Antonio Gracias, one of Musk's closest confidants and an early SpaceX investor, could be the second biggest winner in the IPO.

Gracias owns more than 500 million shares of SpaceX stock through investment firms affiliated with Valor Equity Partners, the private equity firm he founded, which represent roughly 7.3% of SpaceX's Class A stock. That stake could be worth north of $90 billion.

That gain is one of the largest fortunes ever created by a venture investor, though it is unclear how much Gracias personally invested.

After the S-1 was released, Gracias posted on X: "While I'm a large partner in the funds, the majority of the gains go to our LPs. We're deeply grateful for their belief in us and SpaceX beginning with our first investment in 2006."

Real estate agents and developers in Southern California have been eagerly anticipating this day, bracing for a potential influx of newly wealthy buyers.

After SpaceX shifted its headquarters to Texas in 2024, its Hawthorne manufacturing hub remained a major local employer, with 7,661 workers last year, according to city records.

"This is LA's Google moment," Chris Tourtellotte, managing director at LaTerra Development, a Los Angeles real estate investment management and development company, told Business Insider, referring to Google's 2004 IPO that is estimated to have minted over 900 millionaires. "All of a sudden, you will wake up, and there will be thousands of brand-new millionaires."

Agents say Manhattan Beach will likely benefit the most, and prices will spike after lock-up periods end in the fall.

Austin is also hoping for a boost from Space's IPO, with 1,590 employees working in nearby Bastrop County.

Data shows that retail traders were net sellers of stocks for three days in a row this week, the first time since 2020 that's been observed by Vanda Research, which tracks retail flows in ETFs and single stocks.

According to the firm, they've been offloading chip stocks and other AI favorites, possibly to build a "dry powder" stash to throw at new stocks hitting the market this year.

"We're already seeing signs that retail investors are rotating out of recent AI favorites ahead of the IPO wave," Vanda said on Thursday.

SpaceX is the first of the 2026 mega-IPOs to exit the pipeline, with trillions of dollars of additional market cap set to be added from AI titans Anthropic and OpenAI later this year.

Importantly, the debut of Musk's rocket company will set the tone for others to come.

"I expect that the SpaceX IPO will be the high tide that lifts all boats, resulting in a flood of new IPOs, and all-time highs in the market," Ross Carmel, a partner at capital markets law firm Sichenzia Ross Ference Carmel, told Business Insider this week.

On the flip side, an IPO flop could undermine investor enthusiasm and make less high-profile companies hesitant to enter the market in a year when a handful of major whales dominate the conversation.

Some have flagged a possible merger between SpaceX and Tesla, given that both companies are run by Musk and have similarly high-tech ambitions.

The two companies are already intertwined, and it wouldn't be the first time Musk merged entities under his control, with SpaceX acquiring xAI earlier this year.

Wedbush Securities' Dan Ives, who is among Tesla's loudest bulls on Wall Street, said he expected a SpaceX merger in 2027.

The pair's combined valuation would sit around $3 trillion.

Ed Elson, host of the Prof G Markets podcast, recently shared why he's not rushing to buy SpaceX when it debuts. In a Substack post, he highlighted concerns about a supply shock that could negatively impact the broader market as SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI bring massive offerings in relatively quick succession.

Regarding SpaceX specifically, Elson's big issue is with the valuation.

"Compared to previous go-publics, SpaceX's valuation falls nothing short of insane, " Elson wrote. "Meta went public at 28 times sales with 88% revenue growth. Google went public at 10 times sales with 234% growth. Put another way, SpaceX is growing seven times slower while asking for a multiple ten times higher."

SpaceX's S-1 filing showed that the company posted a $4.9 billion loss and a revenue of $18.7 billion in 2025, raising the question: What exactly are SpaceX investors buying?

The company's rocket launch business is the "foundation," and the Starlink satellite internet business is the "financial engine," Cathie Wood's ARK Invest, which holds a stake in SpaceX, said.

The more out-of-this-world ambitions, according to the company's S-1 filing, include data centers in space, Mars colonies, asteroid mining, and opportunities in frontier tech such as AI.

The sense on Wall Street is that SpaceX stock is a bet on the future, similar to how much of the bull thesis propping up Tesla's valuation is rooted in visions of robots and cybercabs.

We knew the retail hype was big, but demand for SpaceX stock from everyday traders is shaping up to be astronomical.

Bloomberg reports that $100 billion in orders have been submitted by individual investors, but with just 30% of the planned $75 billion capital raise earmarked for retail, there's likely to be a lot of disappointed traders.

The rush to open the IPO to more traders kicked off in the weeks leading up to the deal. Fidelity lowered its account minimum to participate in the IPO to $2,000, and SpaceX itself courted day traders in its marketing materials.

For those who can't get in on the action at the IPO price, the stock will begin trading on Nasdaq on Friday under the ticker SPCX.