SpaceX stock soars in debut and makes Elon Musk the first trillionaire
[June 13, 2026] By
BERNARD CONDON
NEW YORK (AP) — Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire after
shares of his rocket company SpaceX soared in Wall Street's biggest
initial public offering of stock.
Shares in SpaceX jumped more than 19% after opening for trading Friday,
a sign that investors are looking past the billions the company is
losing and instead betting that its massive investments in satellites,
orbital data centers and artificial intelligence will pay off in the
future.
SpaceX opened around midday at $150 a share, then rose to around $168,
before finishing the day just below $161. That price gave the company a
market value of $2.1 trillion, making it the sixth largest public U.S.
company — larger even than its founder and CEO's other big business, the
electric vehicle maker Tesla.
Between his holdings in SpaceX and Tesla, where he is also CEO, Musk is
now worth an estimated $1.1 trillion, according to Forbes.
Why SpaceX is going public now
Musk says SpaceX, founded in 2002, is going public now because it needs
money to fund its ambitions of putting satellites and data centers in
space and eventually establishing a colony of people on Mars.
He marked the opening of trading on Nasdaq by joining a ceremonial bell
ringing from Starbase, the South Texas home of SpaceX.
He reiterated his lofty goals “to make life multiplanetary.”
“Not just a few astronauts, I mean literally you,” Musk said. “Whoever
you are watching this, SpaceX wants to be able to take you to the moon,
take you to Mars and ultimately beyond.”
Known for his technological breakthroughs, as well as wild claims and
missed deadlines, Musk was able to whip up enthusiasm for the IPO. The
typical company going public has seen a 7% jump in its first day of
trading, from 1980 through 2025, according to Jay Ritter, a professor at
the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business.
Institutional and retail investors alike jumped at the opportunity to
buy a piece of the company at $135 per share before trading began. The
$75 billion in proceeds SpaceX raised easily topped the previous record
IPO from oil giant Saudi Aramco in 2019.
In addition to establishing a one-million person Martian colony, the
company has promised to save humanity by establishing other outposts in
space, launch data centers the size of football fields into orbit and
outdo rivals Anthropic and OpenAI in the race to make money from
artificial intelligence.
To reach its goals, SpaceX needs billions more than it currently takes
in from its rocket and satellite business. Between the start of 2025 and
March 31, 2026, the company, formally known as Space Exploration
Technologies Corp., lost $8.7 billion.
Pros and cons for investors
Betting on SpaceX is in many ways a bet on Musk himself. In an unusual
arrangement that has drawn criticism from shareholder watchdogs, he
holds 82% interest in a special B class of shares, giving him sweeping
power to control the company even though his ownership stake is about
half that.
“There’s a lot of hype, but I see the faith that investors have in
Musk,” said Yordys Coro, an IT support contractor in Miami as he watched
his $14,000 investment in SpaceX shoot up to $17,000 in just a few
hours. “I’m going to hold on.”
Wall Street bankers that helped take SpaceX public are also enthusiastic
about the company — and the big fees they will earn — but not everyone
thinks the stock price is justified.
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Gwynne Shotwell, President and COO of SpaceX, third from right,
celebrates with colleagues during a bell ringing ceremony for the
IPO of SpaceX at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, Friday, June 12,
2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II)
Analysts at research firm
Morningstar, which doesn't earn any investment banking fees, wrote
that the IPO is “significantly overvalued."
Citing SpaceX’s technology challenges, including shielding its
orbiting datacenters from radiation damage and catching up to
leaders in AI such as Anthropic and OpenAI, they estimated the
company is only worth $780 billion — less than half its IPO value.
SpaceX itself has hinted at the challenges, conceding in regulatory
documents that some of its business plans rest on “unproven
technologies.” It also indicated that another part of the company,
its artificial intelligence business called xAI, has no clear path
to profitability and is burning cash to catch up with rivals.
On a livestreamed conference Thursday with the CEO of JPMorgan
Chase, one of the investment banks making big money off the IPO,
Musk offered few details.
He entertained the crowd with talk of “moon hotels,” a future
Martian colony and a network of Earth-orbiting data centers powered
by the sun. But when asked about plans for his flagship chatbot
offering Grok, he pivoted to talking about his satellites.
How Elon made his fortune
Still, Musk has pulled off the seemingly impossible before.
The now-trillionaire — on paper at least — made his initial fortune
by creating two companies, Zip2 and PayPal, that netted him about
$200 million at sale. He used that money to start SpaceX and invest
in Tesla, and defied the odds by creating a space company that
figured out how to reuse rockets and a car company that made
electric vehicles cool.
Musk has realized vast sums of wealth for himself, much of it in
stock he has yet to cash in or grants for shares he’ll only receive
if Tesla or SpaceX hit ambitious performance targets.
His recent pay package from Tesla was so large it even drew
criticism from the Vatican. At Tesla, he’s worried shareholders by
fighting with regulators or dividing his attention between multiple
companies and last year by taking a role in the Trump
administration.
But a rising stock price has cured all ills: Since it went public in
2010, Tesla has returned 20,000% for shareholders, or more than $1.2
trillion in investor wealth.
SpaceX is the first of three “megacap” companies expected to go
public this year, with Anthropic and OpenAI to follow. Nasdaq even
revised its rules to allow SpaceX to gain entry into funds tied to
its indexes in 15 days, which means investors will end up buying the
rocket maker's shares much earlier.
Not all investors are thrilled about SpaceX potentially showing up
in their holdings of index funds.
Officials from pension funds for firefighters, teachers and other
workers in California and New York sent a letter to SpaceX last
month decrying some of the provisions in its IPO, including
mandatory arbitration of shareholder claims and how much power Musk
will hold over the company.
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AP reporters Stan Choe and Wyatte Grantham-Philips contributed from
New York and reporter Matt O'Brien contributed from Providence.
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