SpaceX Makes History With Largest IPO Ever, Closes Up 19% as Musk Becomes World’s First Trillionaire

Trading volumes were extraordinary. SpaceX traded more than 360 million shares by early afternoon, already ten times the total volume posted by Cerebras, the second-largest IPO of the year, across its entire first day of trading.

To mark the occasion, SpaceX launched a rocket in Florida approximately one hour before the stock market opened, the 650th flight of a Falcon 9 rocket, delivering Starlink broadband satellites into orbit. Musk joined from Starbase, Texas, while SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell and Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen rang the opening bell at the Nasdaq in New York.

SpaceX is now the sixth-largest publicly traded company in the United States. The company has told investors it is targeting a total addressable market of $28.5 trillion across its space, connectivity, and AI divisions. Starlink alone generated 61% of SpaceX’s total revenue in 2025. In early 2026, SpaceX acquired xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, and folded it into its AI division following xAI’s earlier all-stock acquisition of X.

The debut arrives at a moment of significant AI-driven enthusiasm on Wall Street. Goldman Sachs President John Waldron described the SpaceX IPO as evidence of deep appetite to fund the artificial intelligence boom. Analysts broadly described the first day of trading as a success, characterized by healthy gains, limited volatility, and record retail investor demand. Individual investors who requested shares through platforms including Robinhood, Fidelity, and Charles Schwab received modest allocations given the extraordinary level of demand.

The offering is expected to be the first of several major AI-related IPOs. Anthropic, the Seattle-area company behind the Claude model, has already filed confidentially for a public listing, with its own market debut potentially coming later this year.