SpaceX shares climbed 19 percent in their Nasdaq debut Friday, a session that pushed the rocket-and-AI company's market value past $2 trillion and crowned Elon Musk the first trillionaire on record. The stock opened at $150, touched an intraday high of $176.52 and closed at $160.95, a day after Thursday's record $75 billion initial public offering priced at $135 a share.
The debut converted a long-anticipated pricing event into a live tape. More than 500 million shares changed hands under the ticker SPCX, dwarfing every other listing this year, and the move handed Musk a paper fortune of roughly $1.1 trillion across his SpaceX and Tesla stakes. About 4,400 SpaceX employees became millionaires on the open, according to the New York Times, and the company's $2.1 trillion market cap vaulted it past Tesla and into the top tier of U.S.-listed corporations.
On the tape
SpaceX opened at $150, an 11 percent premium to the IPO price, but below the $175 level shown in indications of interest to trading desks before the bell, CNBC reported. The shares climbed to $168.75, dipped to about $158, then rebounded to a new high of $176.52 before settling at $160.95.
"This was a successful launch, no doubt about it," said Jay Woods, chief market strategist at Freedom Capital Markets. "The public demand is there, so that's a good thing. But now we'll wait to see if it can hold that open price, or was it an euphoric retail crowd driving it."
Goldman Sachs, the lead-left bookrunner on the transaction, rose more than 2 percent and was the second-biggest gainer in the Invesco KBW Bank ETF. Listed space-industry rivals went the other way as investors rotated into the new name: Redwire fell more than 11 percent, Rocket Lab dropped more than 10 percent and the Procure Space ETF lost 7 percent.
Retail squeeze
The pop landed in spite of, or because of, a scramble among individual investors for shares they could not get. SpaceX cut the retail tranche to a percentage in the low 20s of the total deal, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC, below earlier expectations of roughly 30 percent. Bloomberg reported retail orders alone topped $70 billion; Reuters put total orders above $250 billion.
SpaceX was the most-bought stock by retail traders on net Friday, according to VandaTrack, and was among the most-discussed names on Reddit's WallStreetBets forum in the days before the IPO, meme-stock tracker Breakout Point said.
"Market sentiment is reflecting a book that looks like it was pretty robust," said Dan Alpert, founding managing partner of Westwood Capital. "The folks who only got a portion of the shares they asked for are now looking for a stable market in which to buy."
The trillionaire math
Musk owns about 42 percent of SpaceX and holds 350 million stock options exercisable at $8.39 a share, according to the company's IPO filing. SpaceX accounts for 70 percent of his total net worth, per Bloomberg's Billionaire Index. The next-richest person on that list, former Google chief executive Larry Page, is worth $304 billion.
Musk addressed the listing from SpaceX's Starbase headquarters in Texas as executives rang the opening bell at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York. "It is certainly hard to believe that a little company that started in a warehouse in El Segundo, [California], is now going public," Musk said. He has said he is raising capital to put more than 100,000 communications satellites in orbit and to build AI data centers in space.
The counterweight
The trillionaire milestone drew a backlash that today's wire reporting captures only through a partisan lens. Graham Platner, the Maine Democrat who won his Senate primary Tuesday, posted on X, "Elon Musk just became the world’s first trillionaire," an eight-word lament that drew more than 2 million views and a wave of conservative ridicule. "Communists can never quite grasp that if you make Musk poorer, you make millions of others poorer in the process because unlike them, he actually creates value for others in society," Red State writer Bonchie posted on X. No left-leaning wire source appears in the body-tier reporting available for this edition, so the substantive case against concentrated trillionaire wealth is filtered through the rebuttals to it. Separately, some market participants flagged valuation concerns and potential growth obstacles for Starlink heading into the deal, CNBC reported.
The next test is a full week of trading. SpaceX's debut is expected to set the tone for confidential IPO filings already on file from Anthropic and OpenAI, and Woods said the verdict on Friday's open will come Monday and beyond. "You have to give it a full trading day, which will be next week," he said. "The initial thoughts on the trading desks were that it could get up to $200."