Shares in South African born Elon Musk’s SpaceX closed almost 20% higher on their trading debut Friday after the biggest IPO in history, making the polarising entrepreneur the world’s first trillionaire as he vowed to take humanity to Mars.

The blockbuster initial public offering, which raised more than $75 billion, is expected to kick off a series of major IPOs by AI companies in the coming months.

The debut on the Nasdaq exchange in New York capped weeks of investor frenzy over the rocket company turned AI and satellite conglomerate.

The stock climbed as high as $176, or 31% above its offering price of $135, in its first session before ending the day at $161.50.

“SpaceX wants to be able to take you to the Moon, take you to Mars, and ultimately beyond,” Musk said at a launch event in Starbase, Texas, surrounded by staff, many of whom became multi-millionaires with the launch of trading.

“I’m confident at this point that with the incredible team that we have here at SpaceX, that we will do that for you,” Musk added.

About 100 people assembled outside the Nasdaq’s home in New York, where SpaceX also marked the occasion with a neon sign in Times Square.

Musk “sets very futuristic goals that no one else is doing, and I think that has got a lot of people excited,” said Sarin Sio, of financial company Dovetail, who had come to the Nasdaq headquarters.

The company priced more than 555 million shares at $135 each in a Thursday filing with the US markets regulator, valuing SpaceX at just under $1.8 trillion.

Friday’s gain lifted SpaceX’s market value to more than $2 trillion, placing it amongst the 10 most valuable American companies, ahead of Tesla, Facebook-owner Meta and Walmart.

Options for nearly 83 million additional shares could push the total raised above $86 billion.

Rocket startup to AI conglomerate

Co-founded by Musk in 2002, the rocket startup has since expanded into a major satellite operator and has also folded in Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, which includes the social media platform X.

Trading under the ticker symbol “SPCX,” the conglomerate is being closely watched for how Wall Street absorbs the offering and what it will mean for its AI rivals looking to trade on the public markets as early as this year.

OpenAI and Anthropic both recently filed initial documents with regulators.

Friday’s IPO comes just over a year after Musk left President Donald Trump’s administration, following a months-long stint leading the highly contentious “DOGE” effort to slash government spending whilst simultaneously juggling his CEO roles at Tesla and SpaceX.

Musk’s backing of Trump and right-wing populists in Europe, and a long list of incendiary comments on X, has seen the entrepreneur go from a broadly admired prodigy to a deeply polarising figure.

The record IPO is nonetheless a testament to Musk’s continued support amongst investors, with Bloomberg reporting that the offering was more than four times oversubscribed.

Demand amongst retail investors, for whom 20% of shares were reserved, was also reported to be high.

New billionaires minted

The IPO is expected to mint thousands of new millionaires and several billionaires, with former and current employees, and a long list of investors from the company’s near quarter-century history, looking to cash in.

The valuation largely depends on Musk delivering on promises worthy of science fiction, including putting data centres in space and humans on Mars using as-yet unproven technology.

A lot also hangs on a huge expansion of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service as well as the success of xAI, the maker of the Grok chatbot and Musk’s rival to OpenAI and Anthropic that has yet to gain traction.

In an effort to shore up its books, SpaceX is renting out its AI computing capacity to Anthropic and Google through short-term deals worth billions of dollars.

Whilst SpaceX is growing quickly, revenue hit $18.7 billion in 2025, it is also losing money, producing a net loss of $4.9 billion, mainly on spending to build AI capacity.

In an extraordinary prediction, SpaceX’s filing claims it can pull in more than $28.5 trillion in revenue from its various markets.

The milestone makes Musk by far the world’s richest person, an achievement that earned criticism from some quarters.

“The world will get its first trillionaire whilst Americans across the country are scraping together every dollar to save for retirement,” said Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren.

ALSO READ: Musk merges xAI into SpaceX in ambitious bid to build space data centres

Who is Elon Musk?

Elon Reeve Musk was born on 28 June 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa, to a South African father and Canadian mother. He attended Waterkloof House Preparatory School and Bryanston High School before matriculating from Pretoria Boys High School.

At 17, Musk moved to Canada to avoid mandatory military service in apartheid South Africa, attending Queen’s University in Ontario. He later transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned bachelor’s degrees in economics and physics.

In 1995, Musk began a PhD in energy physics at Stanford University but left after just two days to pursue entrepreneurial ventures during the internet boom.

He co-founded Zip2, a web software company, which Compaq acquired for $307 million in 1999. Musk then co-founded X.com, an online payment company that became PayPal after a merger. eBay purchased PayPal for $1.5 billion in 2002.

Using his PayPal proceeds, Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of reducing space transportation costs. He joined Tesla Motors in 2004 as chairman and later became CEO, transforming the electric vehicle manufacturer into a major automotive company.

His wealth skyrocketed as Tesla’s stock price surged, making him the world’s richest person by 2021. His acquisition of Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, later rebranded as X, proved controversial but expanded his influence across technology, space exploration and social media.

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