SpaceX shares closed just above $161 on Friday in their first day of trading, a gain of roughly 19 percent over the $135 offering price and a strong finish to the largest initial public offering in Wall Street history. The stock, listed under the ticker SPCX, opened at $150 in an initial trade of about 58 million shares before grinding higher through the session.
The rocket and satellite company priced 555,555,555 Class A shares at $135 apiece on Thursday, raising $75 billion and valuing the company at roughly $1.77 trillion. Both figures are records: no company had previously raised more than $30 billion in a public debut, and none has arrived on a US exchange at so large a starting valuation.
Trading volume was enormous by any standard. More than 500 million SPCX shares changed hands across US exchanges by the close, according to Yahoo Finance data, making the stock by far the most active name on the tape in its debut session.
SpaceX executives rang the Nasdaq opening bell in New York on Friday morning, with the company's listing split between the Nasdaq Global Select Market and the exchange's new Texas venue. Reuters reported that the first-day pop cemented chief executive Elon Musk's status as the world's first trillionaire, given his controlling stake.
The debut landed on an unusually friendly day for risk assets. Stocks rallied and oil fell to multi-month lows on hopes that a US-Iran memorandum of understanding could be signed within days, ending a war that has shut the Strait of Hormuz and rattled markets since March.
The offering caps a two-week sprint that began with the company's confidential filing becoming public and an oversubscribed book that, according to multiple reports, drew orders well in excess of the shares available. SpaceX's pitch to investors leans on its Starlink satellite internet business, which now accounts for the majority of revenue, alongside its launch monopoly economics and ambitions in space-based computing.
The successful debut is likely to accelerate the IPO queue behind it. OpenAI and Anthropic have both filed confidentially with the Securities and Exchange Commission in recent weeks, and bankers have pointed to SpaceX's reception as the clearest test yet of public-market appetite for trillion-dollar private valuations.