NEW YORK, June 13 (Our New York News) — SpaceX’s first day as a public company on Nasdaq turned one of the world’s largest private fortunes into a public-market number.
The rocket and satellite company began trading June 12 under the ticker SPCX, according to Nasdaq trading activity cited in market reports. SpaceX priced the initial public offering at $135 a share, raising $75 billion, according to offering terms attributed to the company. The shares opened around $150, climbed as high as about $176.50 during the session and closed near $161, Nasdaq market data showed.
Those trading records point to the central financial result: SpaceX moved from an IPO valuation reported at roughly $1.77 trillion to $1.8 trillion into a first-day market value above $2 trillion, based on the public share price. That change lifted estimates of Elon Musk’s wealth above $1 trillion, according to wealth calculations by Forbes and Bloomberg.
The largest part of that jump came from Musk’s SpaceX holdings. Estimates of that stake vary depending on the share price used and whether options are included. At the IPO price, the stake was estimated at about $688 billion. Other estimates placed it around $690 billion, while calculations based on higher first-day trading prices put the value between about $766 billion and $800 billion.
The figures are estimates, not cash received by Musk. They are tied to stock and options values that can rise or fall with SpaceX’s public share price. Still, the IPO created a market price for a company Musk founded in 2002 and made his SpaceX position one of the largest publicly measurable personal assets in the world.
For New York’s financial markets, the listing was a major Wall Street event even though Musk marked the ceremonial start of trading remotely from Starbase in South Texas, according to AP and PBS NewsHour accounts of the Nasdaq ceremony. The deal also brought a new public-market test for investors buying into a company whose value depends on rockets, satellites and long-term space infrastructure plans.
Musk has said SpaceX went public to fund satellites and data centers in space and, eventually, a human settlement on Mars, according to AP. The public record available from the IPO pricing and Nasdaq trading shows investors paid well above the $135 offering price on the first day.
That demand also sharpened a question for public investors: whether the market price can be supported by SpaceX’s business outlook. Morningstar analysts, described by AP and PBS as independent of investment-banking fees, estimated SpaceX’s value at about $780 billion, far below the IPO valuation. The analysts called the IPO “significantly overvalued.”
The gap is large. At $780 billion, Morningstar’s estimate was less than half the value implied by the IPO price and far below the more than $2 trillion market value implied by the first-day close. That does not prove the market price is wrong, but it shows that at least one independent research firm placed a much lower value on the company than public investors did on the first day.
The ownership record is less clear from the available materials. Several reports describe a dual-class or special share structure that leaves Musk with outsized control, but the exact percentages conflict. Reported figures include about half of overall ownership with 82% of a special class, 42% ownership, 38% ownership and about 85% voting power. The underlying prospectus or full share-count filing was not included in the provided records, so those numbers cannot be reconciled here.
What can be verified from the available evidence is narrower but still substantial: SpaceX completed a $75 billion IPO, began trading on Nasdaq as SPCX, rose sharply in its first session and ended the day with a public-market value above $2 trillion. Forbes and Bloomberg wealth estimates based on those prices placed Musk’s net worth at roughly $1.05 trillion to $1.11 trillion.
