SpaceX Sets $135 IPO Price for Thursday's Nasdaq Debut — History's Largest Public Offering

When SpaceX prices at $135 per share on Thursday evening, it will become the most valuable company ever to go public — by a margin that leaves previous record-holders in a different century. At that price, the 25-year-old rocket company carries a market capitalization of approximately $1.75 trillion, nearly three times the size of Saudi Aramco’s IPO in 2019 and more than triple the Alibaba offering that held the record for nearly a decade. The $75 billion fundraise eclipses every prior equity issuance in market history.

Trading under the ticker SPCX begins on the Nasdaq on June 12, 2026. Goldman Sachs is the lead underwriter, followed by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase — essentially every major Wall Street name united behind a single deal.

What Investors Are Actually Buying

SpaceX today is not the company most retail investors remember from NASA launch coverage. The $135 price tag bundles three meaningfully distinct businesses into one publicly traded vehicle.

The legacy space launch business — Falcon 9 and the emerging Starship platform — remains the revenue anchor. SpaceX has launched more payload to orbit than all other providers combined and is extending its dominance through Starship, which completed its first operational crewed mission to the International Space Station in late 2025. Launch services generate relatively predictable revenue from commercial satellite operators, NASA, and DoD contracts.

Starlink, the global satellite broadband constellation, has become the company’s growth engine. With more than 8 million subscribers across 100-plus countries as of early 2026, Starlink generates substantial recurring revenue and has reached profitability at the segment level. The constellation also underpins SpaceX’s negotiations with national governments for sovereign broadband deals — a strategic asset that extends well beyond retail internet service.

The third component is the most speculative: AI operations inherited from xAI through the February 2026 merger. Elon Musk combined xAI — the company behind the Grok models — with SpaceX in a deal that gave xAI shareholders SpaceX equity and consolidated Grok’s compute infrastructure within SpaceX’s orbital and terrestrial data center network. This means SPCX investors gain indirect exposure to Grok’s development and any future revenue from AI services. Analysts disagree sharply on how to value this component; some see it as optionality, others as a distraction.

The Valuation Debate

The $1.75 trillion valuation has drawn both enthusiasm and sharp skepticism in equal measure. At $135 per share, SpaceX trades at roughly 92 times trailing revenue — an extraordinary multiple for a company that, despite impressive growth, is not currently profitable at the consolidated level.

Morningstar’s equity research team published a fair value estimate of $780 billion, approximately 48% below the IPO price. That gap reflects a straightforward disagreement about the discount rate appropriate for a company with SpaceX’s cash burn, capital intensity, and still-developing Starship platform. Morningstar’s analysts note that Starship’s economics, while potentially transformative, remain unproven at commercial scale.

Bulls point to the Google deal disclosed last week — $920 million per month for access to compute infrastructure through 2029 — as evidence that SpaceX’s xAI and data center assets are generating real enterprise revenue beyond its traditional launch and broadband businesses. They also argue that Starlink’s subscriber base is growing faster than analysts projected 18 months ago, and that government broadband contracts in the EU and Southeast Asia are adding durability to the revenue mix.

The $7 billion in forced index fund buying expected around the Nasdaq-100 inclusion date — likely within 15 trading days of the June 12 debut under rules Nasdaq implemented in March 2026 — provides a near-term technical support floor that sophisticated investors are already pricing in.

How the Deal Got Here

SpaceX filed its S-1 registration statement with the SEC in May 2026, triggering a review process that moved unusually fast. The roadshow launched June 4 — ahead of the originally expected week of June 8 — suggesting strong institutional demand allowed bankers to compress the timeline. By the time shares priced Wednesday evening, the order book was said to be heavily oversubscribed.

The accelerated timeline reflects, in part, a favorable market backdrop. The tech IPO market has revived dramatically in 2026 following the Cerebras (CBRS) debut in May, which closed its first day up 68% and peaked near a $95 billion market cap. Anthropic’s S-1 filing has attracted similar institutional interest, suggesting investors remain willing to price AI-adjacent infrastructure at premium multiples.

SpaceX’s decision to include a fast-track provision for Nasdaq-100 inclusion is a notable structural choice. Under the March 2026 rule change, mega-IPOs meeting liquidity and market cap thresholds can be included in the index within 15 trading days of debut. For SpaceX, this means QQQ holders — who track the Nasdaq-100 through the world’s fourth-largest ETF — could find themselves with SPCX exposure by late June or early July, whether or not they intended to own space infrastructure.

Musk’s Leverage

The IPO also raises governance questions that institutional investors have flagged privately. Elon Musk retains significant control of SpaceX through a share structure designed to limit dilution of his voting rights. As with Tesla and his other ventures, Musk’s involvement is simultaneously the company’s most cited strength — his direct involvement in engineering decisions and his willingness to take technical bets that traditional aerospace companies would not — and its most significant governance risk.

The xAI merger deepened that complexity. SpaceX’s public shareholders now hold a stake in a company with interests spanning orbital launch, consumer broadband, AI research, and orbital computing infrastructure, all ultimately steered by a single founder. Prospectus disclosures describing Musk’s other roles and potential conflicts of interest run to several pages.

What Comes Next

First-day trading on June 12 will be closely watched as a real-time validation of the $135 price. After Cerebras’s +68% first-day pop, institutional investors will be watching whether SPCX sustains its open or retreats toward the Morningstar fair value range — the latter scenario would signal that price discovery is doing its work despite the bullish roadshow demand.

Longer term, the company’s commercial Starship manifest for 2026 and 2027 is the real story. Each Starship launch at full commercial pricing would generate revenue that dwarfs a Falcon 9 flight, and the learning rate improvements the company has been achieving with Starship test flights suggest the vehicle is maturing faster than many expected. If Starship reaches reliable commercial operations by mid-2027 as SpaceX projects, the valuation math changes considerably.

For now, SPCX represents the rare thing: a genuinely transformative company going public at a moment when its core businesses are operational, its moat is demonstrably wide, and its future optionality is real — if harder to price than the prospectus’s 92x revenue multiple would suggest.