SpaceX shares expected to jump 30% in record-breaking IPO

Shares of Elon Musk’s rocket company are expected to start trading publicly on Friday, with the offering projected to raise $75 billion, making it the largest initial public offering (IPO) in history.

Musk, SpaceX’s chairman, CEO and controlling shareholder, rang the Nasdaq’s opening bell from the company’s headquarters in Starbase, Texas, alongside hundreds of employees. Other executives, employees and investors simultaneously joined the celebration on the floor of the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York, on which SpaceX shares will trader under the ticker symbol SPCX, News.Az reports, citing NBC news.

The offering marks not just a historic moment for its size, but also its scope. SpaceX is the first of what is expected to be many major IPOs related to AI. Anthropic and OpenAI are also readying public offerings.

Early indications showed that shares were poised to open at $175, 30% higher than where the company priced its shares on Thursday. Bankers had set $135 as its IPO price, giving the rocket company a $1.77 trillion value before shares even began to trade.

“I gave SpaceX a less than 10% chance of succeeding at all,” Musk said moments before the bell rang.

“Let me tell you, if people had told me this was gonna happen, I was like, man, you must be smoking some really good crack, because I think this company’s gonna fail,” he said.

“We want to be able to take anyone who wants to go to the moon, anyone who wants to go to Mars, or anywhere in the solar system, and maybe beyond the solar system at some point” aboard a SpaceX rocket, Musk added. He said he was “confident” that the company “will do that.”

Musk founded SpaceX in 2002, when rocket launches were almost entirely dominated by major governments. Since then, the company along with others, including Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Rocket Lab, have made major strides. NASA currently relies on SpaceX to get its astronauts and cargo to and from the space station, and the company is also expected to play a key role in NASA’s return to the moon.

While SpaceX has historically made much of its money from launching spacecraft, cargo and other payloads for NASA, the U.S. military and commercial partners, the company has expanded in recent years into other businesses, most notably its Starlink satellite internet business. Musk has also made some aggressive — some might say outlandish — predictions about the future of the company’s artificial intelligence efforts including its own xAI business, which Musk also co-founded and was acquired by SpaceX in February.

The stock debut comes at a time when AI-fueled euphoria on Wall Street has never been higher. Despite a war with Iran that has stretched into a fourth month, major stock indexes continue to notch record highs, thanks primarily to shares of AI-linked companies.

Goldman Sachs President John Waldron said the SpaceX IPO is a sign that there’s an appetite to fund the artificial intelligence boom.

“It shows you that the capital markets — led by the U.S. capital markets, but the global capital markets — are demonstrating a willingness to finance this AI infrastructure build and this build in space,” he told Bloomberg Television in a Friday morning interview.

Goldman Sachs is the lead underwriter of the SpaceX offering, along with Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup. There are more than a dozen additional banks involved in the process.

Not everyone is convinced by the high valuation, though.

News.Az 

By Ulviyya Salmanli