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SpaceX IPO closes up 19% at $160.95, making Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire

· by Pondero Newsdesk

The short version

SpaceX priced 555.6 million shares at $135 each on June 12, raising $75 billion in the largest IPO in history. Shares closed up 19% and the debut reshapes the compute economics behind xAI.

SpaceX IPO closes up 19% at $160.95, making Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire

SpaceX went public on the Nasdaq on June 12, 2026, pricing 555.6 million shares at $135 each to raise $75 billion in what markets recorded as the largest IPO in history. Shares closed at $160.95, up 19% on the day, per TechCrunch's close-of-market report.

What happened

Shares opened at $150, an 11% pop above the $135 IPO price, then climbed as high as $176 in midday trading before settling at $160.95 at close. At the intraday peak, SpaceX's market capitalization approached $2.3 trillion. Musk, who holds voting control equivalent to roughly 85.1% of shares per SpaceX's S-1 filing, crossed the $1 trillion personal net wealth mark when the stock debuted at $150.

The offering was oversubscribed by 4x, per Bloomberg, meaning many institutional buyers missed their allocations and purchased shares in the open market. Only about 4% of SpaceX's total shares were available for public trading on day one.

Investment banks captured roughly $500 million in total underwriting fees, per the Wall Street Journal, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley taking the largest shares. Founders Fund, which invested $600 million in SpaceX and owns a 3% stake, saw estimated returns above $50 billion at the $135 IPO price, per Bloomberg.

Why it matters for AI

The debut has direct implications for Musk's AI company, xAI. SpaceX's S-1 filing disclosed that Anthropic agreed in May to pay xAI $1.25 billion per month for compute through May 2029, locking in access to the full output of xAI's Colossus 1 data center near Memphis, Tennessee, per TechCrunch's May 20 report. The deal could bring xAI over $40 billion in revenue over its term.

That arrangement, listed in SpaceX's public disclosures as a compute-monetization strategy, helped validate xAI's infrastructure value to IPO investors. Google also signed a compute supply agreement with SpaceX worth $920 million per month, per TechCrunch. Both deals positioned xAI's Colossus cluster as a sellable asset rather than pure internal overhead.

The S-1 filing also disclosed a SpaceX subsidiary called SpaceXAI that provides satellite-enabled AI inference services. xAI itself remains a separate private company, but shares investors and infrastructure contracts with SpaceX. A successful public market debut raises the baseline valuation context for xAI if it pursues its own offering.

Context

SpaceX posted a $4.9 billion net loss on revenues above $18 billion in 2025 per its S-1, accumulating more than $37 billion in losses since its founding. The IPO nonetheless attracted outsized demand, driven largely by Starlink's subscriber growth and the compute-lease contracts.

The New York Times reported that around 4,400 SpaceX employees stand to become millionaires, with roughly 400 reaching centimillionaire status. SpaceX also successfully lobbied major indexes, including the Nasdaq 100, to change inclusion rules so the company could join quickly rather than waiting months, a move expected to generate automatic buying from index funds in the days following the close.

SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell, speaking to CNBC on June 12, suggested a merger between SpaceX and Tesla "might make Elon's life a little easier," per TechCrunch's live coverage. Shotwell did not detail any formal merger plan.

What to watch next

Investors tracking the AI ecosystem have two things to follow. First, whether xAI's private valuation gets revised upward given SpaceX's debut multiple and the disclosed compute revenue. Second, Anthropic and OpenAI have both been subjects of IPO speculation. SpaceX's successful $75 billion offering at a company still running losses sets a data point for how public markets may receive AI-adjacent companies at scale.

The Anthropic compute contract with xAI includes a 90-day termination clause on either side. Any renegotiation or early exit would affect both companies' disclosed financials in subsequent reporting.

Sources