In what is the biggest public market debut ever in history, Elon Musk’s rocket company made a stunning NASDAQ debut, listing at $150 apiece. That took the company to $1.96Tn in valuation. At peak, the shares traded as high as $164, taking it well past the $2Tn mark.
And even though the listing is already blockbuster in all sense, earlier trends had indicated an even bumper listing — early trends showed the stock would open at $175 a share. Still, the $150 mark is 11% above the asking price of $135 apiece — a rarity in itself considering SpaceX did not go via the traditional route of providing a price band to shareholders.
The listing capped a record-breaking fundraising exercise. SpaceX sold about 555.6 million shares, raising $75 billion in fresh capital and breaking every previous IPO record. The offering surpassed the around $26 billion raised by Saudi Aramco in 2019 and was larger than the combined inflation-adjusted proceeds of many of the biggest technology listings of the last two decades. At the IPO price alone, SpaceX entered the market with a valuation of $1.77 trillion, making it the first trillion-dollar company ever to go public and instantly placing it among the world’s most valuable companies.
One of the most notable aspects of the SpaceX IPO was the unusually large role given to retail investors. While most blockbuster IPOs reserve only about 5-10% of shares for individual investors, SpaceX allocated around 20% of the offering — and some reports suggested the figure may have been as high as 30% during the allocation process. Even with that expanded allocation, demand vastly exceeded supply. Retail orders alone reportedly surpassed $70 billion and may have crossed the $100 billion mark globally.
Meanwhile, institutional appetite was equally intense. More than 1,000 institutional investors participated in the book-building process, including mutual funds, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and long-only asset managers. Morgan Stanley reportedly hosted hundreds of institutional investors in meetings with SpaceX executives ahead of the listing, while total demand for the IPO is estimated to have reached between $250 billion and $300 billion, making the deal around three to four times oversubscribed.
Another significant milestone from SpaceX’s blockbuster market debut was Elon Musk becoming the first person in history to build a net worth exceeding $1 trillion. As trading began on Nasdaq, SpaceX shares opened at $150, comfortably above the around $141-per-share level needed to push Musk into trillionaire status, before surging to as high as $164 during early trading. Musk’s fortune was powered primarily by his stake in SpaceX, which was estimated to be worth about $870 billion following the company’s IPO, while his holdings in Tesla, Neuralink, The Boring Company and other ventures lifted his total wealth to more than $1.4 trillion.
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