SpaceX is set to price its initial public offering late Thursday and begin trading Friday on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX, after Elon Musk's rocket-and-AI conglomerate ran more than four times oversubscribed at a take-it-or-leave-it price of $135 a share, a fundraise of roughly $75 billion and a valuation near $1.77 trillion that would instantly make it the seventh-largest listed company in the United States.

The debut would be the largest stock-market listing ever recorded, more than doubling Saudi Aramco's $29.4 billion 2019 offering, and the first chance for retail investors to buy into a company whose founder will keep more than 80 percent of voting power. Friday's open also fires the starter pistol on a three-deep parade of AI listings, with Anthropic and OpenAI both queued behind SpaceX at the SEC.

The price and the book

SpaceX fixed its IPO price at $135 rather than offering a range, and earmarked up to 30 percent of the deal — about $22.5 billion — for individual investors. Fidelity is offering the shares to customers with as little as $2,000 in their accounts. The book is roughly four times oversubscribed, Bloomberg reported.

The valuation puts SpaceX on a price-to-earnings ratio of almost 100, against about 20 to 25 for Nvidia and roughly 10 for Apple, according to CNBC. Revenue grew by a third last year to $18.7 billion, much of it from Starlink, but the company lost $4.9 billion in 2025 and another $4.28 billion in the first quarter.

The dissents

Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., asked the SEC on Tuesday to delay the listing, citing the valuation, Musk's "uniquely unchecked" power as majority shareholder and the decision by Nasdaq, FTSE Russell and other index firms to fast-track SpaceX into benchmarks that passive funds must track. Warren wrote in a 12-page letter that "major stock market indexes are being rigged in a way that would force millions of investors in passive index funds" into SpaceX exposure. The SEC has not commented.

North Carolina Treasurer Brad Briner, who runs roughly $200 billion for the state's teachers, firefighters and police, said on CNBC's "Squawk Box" Wednesday his fund would not buy SpaceX directly. "There's been a pricing issue that we've been concerned about for the last year or so with SpaceX," Briner said. "But at some point, things are fully priced." Briner said North Carolina has instead put about $40 million into OpenAI and $250 million into Anthropic, a position he said is now worth more than $600 million, and would pick up SpaceX only through index funds.

What the perps say

The pre-IPO perpetual futures contract on Hyperliquid, a crypto venue popular with leveraged traders, was changing hands around $162 on Wednesday, about 20 percent above the $135 IPO price and down from a peak above $220 reached after the contract's May launch. "Perpetuals on Hyperliquid suggest there's interest in the SpaceX IPO, but it's far from euphoric," Eric Chen, co-founder of Injective Labs, told CNBC. "It's a useful signal, but not a guarantee of how the broader market will react once SpaceX actually lists."

New Street Research told clients it expects shares to reach $165 within 12 months, a 22 percent gain that would carry the valuation to $2.3 trillion. Ron Baron of Baron Capital told CNBC the company would be worth "$10 trillion, $20 trillion, $30 trillion" within 15 years.

The counterparty

Right-leaning outlets had not weighed in on the SpaceX listing by press time. The sharpest skeptical voice in the wires came from David Trainer of research firm New Constructs, who wrote on LinkedIn the deal "looks more like a way to lure unsuspecting investors into paying off $62.6 billion in debt (78% of expected IPO proceeds), fund an increasingly costly AI race, and lock in a trillion-dollar pay day" for insiders.

Pricing is expected after Thursday's close. Trading opens Friday on the Nasdaq under SPCX. The next test arrives with SpaceX's first quarterly report as a public filer, when investors will get their first look at margins on rocket launches, Starlink and the xAI compute that Google has agreed to rent for $920 million a month.