What we covered here
• SpaceX soared Friday in its blockbuster stock market debut, with shares gaining 19% after Wall Street’s biggest-ever IPO.
• The rocket and AI company, which Elon Musk founded in 2002, is now valued at over $2 trillion, joining Musk’s Tesla as one of the world’s top-ten most valuable companies.
• Musk, who owns nearly half the company’s stock, has now made history as the world’s first trillionaire.
Our live coverage of SpaceX IPO has ended. Read more of our coverage here.
Stocks overall finish higher as SpaceX debuts
US stocks closed higher overall on Friday.
The Dow gained about 353 points, a 0.7% increase for the day. The S&P 500 and tech-heavy Nasdaq rose about 0.5% and 0.3%, respectively.
The Trump administration on Friday signaled a peace deal with Iran could be close, and fresh data showed that consumer sentiment rose in June for the first time in three months.
SpaceX shares close up 19%
SpaceX shares fluctuated a few cents after the closing bell.
The stock settled at $160.95, up 19.22% from the target price of $135.
SpaceX closes a blockbuster trading day on the Nasdaq balcony
SpaceX celebrated a record IPO and first trading day on a balcony on the Nasdaq in Times Square on Friday, with the Times Square ball high above SpaceX employees and at least two people dressed up as astronauts.
One attendee celebrating SpaceX’s debut held up an “Occupy Mars” sign, a nod to Musk’s ambition for human settlement on the red planet.
“We wouldn’t be here without world-class employees at every level, so thank you,” said SpaceX Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen. “I do think we’re just getting started on our journey.”
What to know about SpaceX’s competition with Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin
SpaceX for years stood apart in the commercial space industry for its engineering excellence and ability to bring out-there ideas to fruition.
But Blue Origin has drawn parallels, with its multibillionaire founder (Jeff Bezos) and its own grandiose ideas.
Each company has its own vision for humanity’s future among the stars. While Musk’s core mission has always been to create a self-sustaining city on Mars, Bezos favors the idea of massive, spinning space station in Earth’s orbit.
But Blue Origin, founded two years earlier than SpaceX, has long lagged behind Musk’s venture.
Historically, Blue Origin was okay with that. The company embraced a tortoise as its mascot with the slogan: “Gradatim Ferociter,” Latin for “Step by Step, Ferociously.”
But in recent years, Blue Origin has been making strides to better compete with SpaceX. It launched its first orbital rocket last January, for example.
But i’ts also faced excruciating setbacks — notably, the explosion of a New Glenn rocket on the launchpad in May as it sat poised for its fourth flight, which came on the heels of prior mission failure. (A similar setback happened to SpaceX… one decade ago.)
Blue Origin has pledged to swiftly rebuild destroyed infrastructure.
SpaceX shares gain 19% after blockbuster IPO
SpaceX shares (SPCX) posted strong gains during their market debut on Friday, lifting the company’s market value above $2 trillion and cementing Musk’s status as the world’s first trillionaire.
SpaceX opened at $150 a share, rose as high as $176.52 during trading and closed at $161.11. Shares pared some gains heading into the closing bell but still finished up 19.34% from the IPO target price of $135.
The IPO was a success, analysts said, given healthy gains, limited volatility and record activity and demand from retail investors. SpaceX is now the sixth-largest publicly traded company in the United states.
“If you look at initial demand for the shares, I think this was actually the likely outcome,” said Howard Chan, founder and CEO at Kurv Investment Management.
Kurv Investment Management is planning to a launch an ETF with exposure to SpaceX in June.
The market action was “right in line with expectations,” said David Fetherstonhaugh, executive vice president for investments at VistaShares.
The broader market closed slightly higher: The S&P 500 rose 0.5%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite gained 0.31%.
xAI’s lost all of its co-founders – except for Musk
Elon Musk started xAI in 2023 with 11 co-founders from some of the nation’s top AI labs and tech companies. But as of a few months ago, none of those cofounders are with the company anymore. Dozens of other high-level employees have also left the company. While high turnover in AI companies is not unusual, losing so many co-founders and key employees in such a short period of time is notable.
While some of the departures were for personal reasons (for example, Greg Yang left after a Lyme disease diagnosis), Musk said during a February all-hands meeting that others were part of the company’s reorganization “to be more effective at this scale.”
“Naturally, when this happens, there are some people who are better suited for the early stages of a company and less suited for the later stages,” he added.
Musk had outlined new division leaders in the February meeting. But even after that restructuring, several of those new leaders also left, Fast Company reported.
“xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up,” Musk posted on X in March.
A SpaceX executive, Michael Nicolls, has since taken on the role of xAI president since the companies merged, Business Insider reported in April.
Catch up on SpaceX's big debut
CNN’s Hadas Gold breaks down how investors are reacting to SpaceX’s big public debt, which saw a record number of retail investors ordering shares of the company.
SpaceX is expected to play a major role in the US moon race with China
Bipartisan lawmakers and science advocates alike are urging the US to return astronauts to the moon before the end of the decade, an effort to beat rival China.
Losing the race back to the moon, advocates say, could cause the US to miss out on the opportunity to build a base in resource-rich regions of the moon, like the south pole, which is believed to be home to vast stores of water ice.
But NASA hasn’t sent people to the moon’s surface since Apollo ended in 1972. And while the space agency proved it can execute a lunar flyby with its Artemis II mission in April, the US still needs a vehicle capable of actually touching down on the moon. It doesn’t have that yet.
That’s where SpaceX comes in.
NASA plans to use SpaceX’s Starship — the largest rocket system ever constructed — for that key portion of the lunar journey.
SpaceX is, however, facing competition from Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, which is building a lander hat hews much closer to the simpler, Apollo-era lunar landers than the gargantuan, engineering quagmire that is Starship.
But if SpaceX can deliver a lunar lander in time to make NASA’s moon landing ambitions a reality, the upsides are immense. The space agency ultimately aims to spend at least $20 billion creating a moon base. And SpaceX could get a massive chunk of that pie, cinching more and more crucial contracts
Musk's near impossible goals
Elon Musk’s SpaceX pay package gives him the option of buying 1 billion shares at a relatively low price. But there’s a catch – SpaceX needs to have a colony on Mars with 1 million people.
That’s a big if. Putting aside the technical challenges of an interstellar colony, it takes a long time to move 1 million people from one location to another. It took approximately 150 years for the European settler population in the future United States to reach 1 million, according to the Library of Congress.
But that’s not the only nearly impossible goal in a Musk pay package. For a full payout at Tesla, the company needs to hit $8.5 trillion in value, which is about 70% higher than the world’s most valuable company, Nvidia.
He also has to get one million robotaxis on the road (the service is still in limited testing) and sell one million humanoid robots (those are still in development).
NASA’s Artemis III mission highlights SpaceX competition with Blue Origin
SpaceX has long been in a league of its own in the space industry. But Blue Origin is looking to change that.
Both SpaceX and Blue Origin are racing to build lunar landers that NASA could use to land its astronauts back on the moon for the first time in five decades.
But on Wednesday, NASA chief Jared Isaacman said a late 2027 test mission — called Artemis III — will involve both SpaceX and Blue Origin’s landers. NASA hopes the agency’s Orion spacecraft, carrying four astronauts, will spend time docked with SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon landers in near-Earth orbit during the mission.
One of the vehicles will need to carry out a similar move in deep space to make a moon landing possible.
“I certainly hope they’re both ready for it,” Isaacman told CBS about Blue Origin’s and SpaceX’s involvement in Artemis III. “I will tell you how important it is for Orion to rendezvous and dock with both, so I’d say it’s extremely unlikely we would ever launch that mission unless both were ready.”
Notably, last year, acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy also appeared to publicly chastise SpaceX for not moving more quickly with development of Starship, saying the space agency would consider using Blue Origin’s lander for the next moon landing instead.
Dumping the Twitter name cost the company billions
In July 2023, about nine months after Elon Musk bought the social media platform known as Twitter, he changed its name to X. That proved to be a very costly decision.
X is part of SpaceX under its artificial intelligence unit, xAI. SpaceX disclosed in its filing that the company took a $3.8 billion charge from so-called “Twitter Impairment.” It determined that the new “X” brand was worth less than “Twitter” had been.
The $3.8 billion writedown is an indication that Musk’s love of using the letter X came at a cost. But its not the first time he’s named something after the 24th letter in the alphabet.
One of the first cars that Tesla produced was the Model X. One of Musk’s sons is named X Æ A-12. And, of course, the X is critical to the names of both SpaceX and xAI.
A quick history of xAI
Elon Musk founded xAI, SpaceX’s newest division, in July 2023 as a counterbalance to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which Musk helped cofound and fund before leaving in 2018.
ChatGPT, Musk claimed, had a liberal bias. Beyond that, Musk proclaimed a grand ambition for his company: to make a “maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe.” Musk’s cofounders came from the top AI labs and tech companies, including Google’s DeepMind, OpenAI, Microsoft and Tesla.
Grok, xAi’s chatbot, was unveiled in November 2023 and by December was officially integrated with X, formerly Twitter. Musk has called Grok the most truthful and therefore “safe” AI. But Grok is also far more risque than the other chatbots, with “spicy” and “conspiracy” modes and AI companion bots that are known to quickly delve into intimate conversations.
While Grok has generally scored well on AI model benchmarks, it’s still not considered competitive with Anthropic and OpenAI’s models. It is, however, the only model with access to real-time X data, making it the strongest option for live social media intelligence and trend monitoring.
xAI has also heavily invested in AI infrastructure, including Colossus, currently the world’s largest artificial intelligence supercomputer, located in Memphis, Tennessee.
In 2025, xAI acquired X in an all-stock deal. In early 2026, SpaceX acquired xAI and folded it into the space giant’s AI division.
A sign of what’s to come for AI
Some analysts view SpaceX’s historic public debut as a sign of what’s to come for the broader AI market. Here are some initial thoughts analysts shared leading up to and during SpaceX’s first day of trading:
- “…If these mega IPOs are well -received, many more companies are likely to ride the wave of investor enthusiasm by going public.” — Capital Economics, June 11
- “I think that a successful SpaceX IPO is generally a positive signal for broader investor interest in innovation and technology. It’s a reflection of the demand, interest, and desire to invest in these types of companies.” — Evan Schlossman, principal at SuRo Capital, June 12
- “Overall, SpaceX going public is an important moment for the broader tech sector in our view as this AI Revolution and data takes this next step forward.” — Dan Ives, global head of technology research at Wedbush Securities
But the three companies have fundamentally different paths to profitability and shouldn’t be compared directly, argues Nigel Green, CEO of financial consulting firm deVere Group.
“OpenAI is a bet on turning extraordinary consumer adoption into profits. Anthropic is a bet on enterprise AI becoming embedded across business,” he wrote this week. “SpaceX is a bet on Elon Musk continuing to achieve what critics say cannot be done.”
Just how realistic is Musk’s dream of colonizing Mars?
As CEO of SpaceX, Elon Musk could be compensated up to $7.5 trillion if SpaceX hits certain milestones.
But Musk’s full payout depends on “the Company’s establishment of a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants,” the company’s paperwork spells out.
That’s an outsized ambition. No world government is even attempting to send humans to Mars, given the enormous economic challenges and needed technologies that simply don’t exist yet.
Scientists and academics have long pointed out that such a settlement is currently still in the realm of science fiction. And even if such a colony could exist — it likely would not be a nice place to live.
Settlers will need air-tight habitats to shield them from toxic air and the deadly radiation that rains down on the surface. The journey to the planet alone would take months and be fraught with deadly challenges. And there aren’t any valuable resources on Mars, making ROI prospects limited.
Kelly and Zach Weinersmith wrote in their award-winning book, “A City on Mars”:
Musk expresses gratitude for SpaceX employees after company goes public
Elon Musk, who frequently posts on his social media platform X, spent part of Friday sharing positive posts about SpaceX’s market debut. He also took time to send a brief message to the 22,000 employees of his company.
“I love the incredible people of SpaceX beyond words,” Musk wrote Friday afternoon in a post on X.
Musk rang the Nasdaq opening bell before SpaceX’s market debut from SpaceX’s headquarters in Texas.
How to calculate SpaceX's market value
SpaceX became the sixth-largest publicly traded US company on Friday.
Here’s how to calculate SpaceX’s market value:
Stock price x total shares outstanding = market value.
SpaceX (SPCX) has about 13.076 billion total shares outstanding, per FactSet and the company’s S1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. To get its market value, you multiply that number by the share price.
- At its $135 IPO price, it came out to $1.77 trillion
- At $150 debut, it came out to $1.96 trillion
- Now at $166, it comes out to $2.17 trillion
Amazon (AMZN) , the fifth largest company by market value, was worth about $2.54 trillion as of Friday afternoon.
Here's why SpaceX decided to go public
SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell said she “wasn’t sure” that SpaceX would ever IPO after spending more than two decades as a private company.
“Having a private company was important to us early on because we weren’t really focused on quarterly financials, we were so focused on the long-term outlook for the company,” she told CNBC in an interview on Friday.
So, what changed? SpaceX needed more money.
The company’s projects, from its Starship program to its AI and data center initiatives, require an enormous amount of investment, according to SpaceX’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company aimed to raise $75 billion with its IPO on Friday.
Shotwell said the decision was also driven by strong interest from investors.
“We’ve been feeling, over the last few years, a lot of pressure from everyday Americans and our friends that wanted to buy stock, and there was just no way for these folks to get in,” Shotwell said.
On Friday, a record number of retail investors ordered shares of SpaceX when it debuted on the public market.
Musk is set to be CEO of two top-ten most valuable public companies
In addition to becoming the first trillionaire, Elon Musk is inches away from adding another milestone to his ever-growing resume: CEO of two of the top-ten most valuable publicly-traded companies at the same time.
Musk’s SpaceX, valued around $2.26 trillion hours after making its debut on the Nasdaq, is on track to be the sixth most valuable public company. He’s also CEO of Tesla, the eighth most valuable public company.
There have been examples of CEOs running two prominent public companies at once. For instance, Steve Jobs, who was CEO of Apple and Pixar.
But that’s rare, and neither were the top ten most valuable companies during his simultaneous tenure.
That’s because boards and shareholders, especially of trillion-dollar companies, don’t want a leader who is splitting time between managing multiple high-profile ventures.
Mind the pricing gap
SpaceX’s 30% surge on its market debut reflects intense demand in a bull market that’s been hungry for a big-name IPO.
It also reflects a pricing tactic designed to make headlines.
SpaceX set an initial price of $135 a share. The first trades on Friday went for $150 a share, and the stock shot up above $175 on Friday afternoon.
Underpricing an IPO is common, and it can be a deliberate play to attract interest and fuel buying momentum. It’s similar to how your Realtor may lowball your home’s listing price in a hot seller’s market: Make it look like a steal, and watch the buyers scramble into a bidding war.
“IPO managers do this with the knowledge that the low listing price is not likely to affect the company in the long term,” according to Waymark Capital. ”Most IPO managers are willing to take the risk of underpricing over overpricing.”
