SpaceX employees celebrate the company’s IPO on June 12, 2026.Image: keystone
June 12, 2026, 6:02 p.mJune 12, 2026, 6:02 p.m
Elon Musk’s space company SpaceX started trading in its record IPO with a gain of a good eleven percent. The first price was set at $150 – after an issue price of $135.
Thanks to his holdings in SpaceX and the electric car manufacturer Tesla, Musk becomes the first person with a trillion-dollar fortune – at least on paper. SpaceX’s valuation reached almost two trillion dollars at the first price.
SpaceX, known, among other things, for its Starlink satellite internet service, sold around 555.6 million shares at an issue price of $135 – and thus raised $75 billion (€64.8 billion). In the previous largest IPO, the Saudi Arabian oil company Aramco raised a good $29 billion in 2019.
At the issue price, SpaceX was already worth $1.77 trillion more than the Facebook group Meta. With the first course, the company is one of the most valuable US companies – after Nvidia, Apple, Google parent Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon. The chip specialist Nvidia, inspired by the AI boom, is number one with currently almost five trillion dollars.
SpaceX’s pure business figures are in stark contrast to its stock market value – investors are more likely to pay for the hope of future success. Last year there were losses of around 4.94 billion dollars on sales of 18.67 billion dollars (a good 16 billion euros).
In the future, artificial intelligence will be the biggest business – also through data centers in space. The idea behind it is that the sun can provide a lot of energy there. However, skeptics point to problems such as the considerable construction costs, difficult cooling despite the low temperatures in space, and radiation that can damage circuits.
In its prospectus, SpaceX estimated the future total market for artificial intelligence, including infrastructure, at more than $26 trillion – and cited this as a justification for the high valuation. New York economics professor Aswath Damodaran, who is known as a valuation expert, criticized this sharply. When he read the number, he thought that Musk’s chatbot Grok had written the prospectus “because we know that AI tends to hallucinate,” he said on the TV channel CNBC.
With a voting share of more than 80 percent, Musk will retain full control of SpaceX even after the IPO. The basis for this is shares with more voting rights. At the trading debut, Musk said, among other things, that he had given SpaceX a ten percent chance of success when it was founded.
In the days before the stock market debut, Musk found time to get involved in British politics again. He used his online platform X to amplify voices from extreme critics of Britain’s immigration policy against racially motivated riots.
In the first quarter of this year, SpaceX posted a loss of $4.28 billion on sales of around $4.7 billion. One reason for the red numbers is the high costs of developing the large Starship rocket.
SpaceX invested a total of more than $15 billion in Starship. The company expects the rocket to be ready for commercial flights after all tests are completed in the second half of the year. It is intended to significantly reduce the costs of transport into space. Starship will also be used to put Starlink satellites into orbit, which will make the Internet available from space directly on smartphones.
Starlink is SpaceX’s central moneymaker and generated $3.26 billion in sales in the first quarter. The satellite internet service now has around 10.3 million customers in 164 countries.
Unlike many other IPOs, SpaceX set the issue price of $135 in advance. Companies usually first name a range – and then determine the price based on investor interest.
For SpaceX’s early backers, the IPO will be a windfall. According to the financial service Bloomberg, the investment firm Founders Fund owned by Musk’s long-time companion Peter Thiel holds a stake of around three percent, which was acquired for around $600 million. The stake is worth more than $50 billion at the issue price. The venture financier Sequoia Capital invested around $2 billion – and now holds a stake worth more than $20 billion. (sda/awp/dpa)