SpaceX Prices $75 Billion IPO at $135 a Share, Targeting the Largest Market Debut in History

Elon Musk has never done anything at a normal scale, and SpaceX’s public-market debut — scheduled for June 12 on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX — is no exception. With shares priced at a fixed $135 each and 555.6 million of them on offer, SpaceX is targeting a $75 billion fundraise at a $1.77 trillion valuation. That would, if it prices and trades as expected, become the largest initial public offering in recorded financial history by a margin that dwarfs every other entry on the list.

Saudi Aramco’s 2019 listing raised $29.4 billion and held the record for nearly seven years. SpaceX would surpass it by more than 2.5 times in a single session. Alibaba ($25 billion, 2014), Arm Holdings ($4.9 billion, 2023), and Meta’s 2012 debut feel almost quaint by comparison.

The Numbers Behind the Historic Offering

The company filed its confidential S-1 with the SEC on April 1, 2026, and the investor roadshow launched June 4, just days after the per-share price was fixed. At $135 and 555.6 million shares sold, the post-money valuation sits at $1.77 trillion — enough to place SpaceX above Tesla (currently at roughly $1.6 trillion) as the seventh-largest US company by market capitalization on its first morning of trading.

Elon Musk will retain more than 82% voting control after the offering. Institutional investors, retail participants, and employee option-holders will collectively own the remaining equity but will wield minimal governance influence. This is, structurally, less a company handing itself to the public than a very large fundraise by a company that happens to list on an exchange. Sophisticated investors are pricing in that distinction — and apparently accepting it.

Prediction markets heading into the week have SPCX’s first-day closing market cap at or above $1.8 trillion, which would place it immediately among the ten most valuable equities on the planet.

The Business Behind the Valuation

SpaceX’s commercial engine runs on three cylinders: launch services, Starlink, and an emerging defense-technology division.

Falcon 9 remains the most-launched orbital rocket in history, with a reliability record that has made SpaceX the default choice for commercial satellite operators, NASA cargo missions, and allied government payloads. Falcon Heavy handles heavier payloads. Starship — the fully reusable super-heavy-lift vehicle still maturing through test flights — is positioned as the cost-reduction play that could eventually slash the price per kilogram to orbit by an order of magnitude relative to today’s already-competitive Falcon 9 rates. A single fully-reusable Starship flight, if SpaceX hits its targets, would cost less than a Falcon 9 expendable stage does today.

Starlink, however, is what most analysts believe accounts for the majority of SpaceX’s fundamental value. The global satellite-internet constellation now connects tens of millions of terminals across consumer, enterprise, maritime, aviation, and government markets. NATO member governments and emergency response agencies hold significant Starlink contracts, and the constellation’s geographic breadth gives it a structural advantage over terrestrial fiber in remote and conflict-zone deployments.

The defense segment is newer and less disclosed in the S-1, but the trajectory is clear: SpaceX has won contracts for communications, launch, and sensing capabilities that would have been unthinkable for a private company half a decade ago.

The Cursor Wildcard: A $60 Billion Post-IPO Bet

No analysis of the SpaceX IPO is complete without examining the $60 billion side arrangement that may define the company’s decade after its debut. SpaceX holds an option — exercisable approximately one month after the IPO closes — to acquire Cursor, the AI coding assistant.

The numbers around Cursor are arresting: roughly 67% of Fortune 500 companies now use the tool, and enterprise customers account for approximately 60% of its total revenue. Microsoft reportedly evaluated a Cursor acquisition before passing. The deal’s structure is as unusual as its size. If SpaceX exercises the option, it acquires the most widely deployed enterprise coding product in the market. If it does not, it must pay Cursor a $10 billion breakup fee for the companies’ collaborative work together — still an enormous sum, and one that would have funded years of development on Cursor’s core technology.

The collaboration itself operates under the “SpaceXAI” umbrella, combining Cursor’s software with SpaceX’s Colossus supercomputer cluster, which the company describes as equivalent to approximately one million H100 GPUs in aggregate compute. The stated goal: build the world’s most capable coding and knowledge-work AI, optimized for the demands of SpaceX’s own engineering organization before shipping to the broader market.

Either outcome transforms SpaceX’s profile. Exercise the option, and SpaceX enters the enterprise AI software market with an established product and a Fortune 500 customer base. Walk away with the breakup fee paid, and SpaceX still retains the Colossus infrastructure and presumably a software stack shaped by months of joint development.

The fact that SpaceX — not a hyperscaler — landed this arrangement speaks to how Musk’s companies increasingly operate as a parallel technology ecosystem: SpaceX for launch and connectivity, Tesla for energy and transportation, xAI for model development, and now potentially Cursor for the developer tooling layer.

Why Now?

SpaceX has resisted public markets for years, growing on private capital at successive record valuations. The decision to list in mid-2026 likely reflects several converging forces. First, Starlink has matured to a point where its financials can withstand public scrutiny — and public investors offer a scale of capital private markets cannot efficiently absorb. Second, the Cursor option agreement may have created a timeline: with the acquisition right expiring roughly a month post-IPO, closing the offering on schedule becomes contractually significant. Third, the institutional risk appetite for AI-adjacent infrastructure plays has rarely been stronger. Big Tech’s combined $725 billion in planned AI capital expenditures for 2026 has validated the infrastructure thesis; SpaceX, with orbital compute ambitions via Starlink and Colossus, positions itself as the next vehicle.

Anthropic is reportedly preparing for an October 2026 IPO at a valuation near $900 billion, which would make it the year’s second historic tech listing. But SpaceX goes first. If June 12 delivers the kind of first-day performance the prediction markets anticipate, it will set a new benchmark for what a technology company can be worth when it finally meets the public.

For the engineers and developers who rely on Cursor daily, the most consequential question may arrive a month later: whether SpaceX exercises the option — and what an aerospace-and-internet company owning the world’s most popular AI coding tool looks like in practice.