SpaceX prices shares at $135 in record-breaking IPO

For once, SpaceX is ahead of schedule: Elon Musk’s space and AI conglomerate officially confirmed that it has raised $75 billion from the sale of its shares to its underwriters, who are set to begin marketing the company on the Nasdaq stock exchange Friday. SpaceX priced its 555.6 million shares at $135 each, the company said in an update on its website. That makes SpaceX officially the largest IPO in history, easily eclipsing the $24.9 billion in funds raised by Saudi Aramco during its 2019 public markets debut.

At this price, the deal also looks set to make Musk the world’s first trillionaire. The company, officially known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., will trade under the SPCX ticker symbol. While IPO pricing typically works itself out as markets open, SpaceX took an unusual approach in setting the price well in advance.

The company was testing its $135 share target with investors before its official roadshow started, the Financial Times reported. And that offering, which eschewed traditional IPO pricing practices, attracted four times the available shares, per Bloomberg. As active trading gets underway tomorrow, SpaceX’s share price may sink or rise.

But anecdotal reports suggest that big institutional investors and individual buyers are lining up to purchase shares in the 24-year-old technology company. If the sale is as oversubscribed as the talkative bankers make it out to be, they have an option to bring an additional 83.3 million shares to market, which would raise another $11 billion at the company’s opening price. Hyperliquid, a crypto betting market that attempts to offer synthetic exposure to SpaceX stock, currently prices the shares at $167, suggesting that market participants expect a classic 20% IPO pop on the first day of trading.

In the longer term, there are big open questions about how SpaceX will be able to justify its eye-popping valuation. The company’s outstanding engineering projects, from the world’s largest reusable rocket to a new American chip fab, fill up a daunting to-do list. The biggest beneficiary of the offering is Musk himself.

He owns just under 850 million Class A shares entitled to 1 vote per share. He is also entitled to another 5.6 billion Class B shares, which comes with 10 votes per share and includes the billion shares contingent on a long-shot bet that a million people will end up living in a SpaceX colony on Mars. The listing will deliver Antonio Gracias, founder and CEO of Valor Management, 503.4 million shares, putting the value of his position at nearly $68 billion at the IPO price.

Other major shareholders poised to gain from the historic offering include SpaceX board member and investor Luke Nosek, who owns 33 million shares, and COO Gwynne Shotwell, who holds nearly 12.6 million shares. The IPO will also deliver significant windfalls to many of the roughly 400 venture capitalists who backed the company during its two decades as a private entity, a period in which it raised about $40 billion in private capital. A massive pool of smaller investors who backed SpaceX via special purpose vehicles (SPVs) are also set to see their initial capital multiply.