SpaceX, the aerospace manufacturer and space transportation company founded by Elon Musk, began trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange on Friday in the largest initial public offering in market history, according to the source report. The offering priced at $135 per share for 555.6 million shares, giving the company an immediate market valuation of approximately $1.77 trillion. The IPO is expected to create an estimated 4,000 new millionaires,with a select group of around 400 employees each potentially gaining as much as $100 million, and a few dozen possibly receiving over $500 million; Musk himself is projected to become the world's first trillionaire.

A $1.77 Trillion Valuation and the 4,000 New Millionaires It Created

The source report states that SpaceX's market capitalization of $1.77 trillion makes it the seventh most valuable publicly traded company in the United States, surpassing Tesla, another Musk-led enterprise. The float of roughly $75 billion in stock generated a wave of wealth: thousands of retail investors who bought shares in the IPO are now millionaires on paper.. However, the source also notes that a key uncertainty is how many of those investors intend to flip their shares for quick profits rather than hold for the long term.

Why Starlink Is the Only Profitable Piece – And What That Means for Investors

According to the source, analysts contend that the sole currently profitable segment of SpaceX is the Starlink satellite internet division. During a livestream before the market open, Musk indicated that SpaceX has maintained positive cash flow since approximately 2015, but the source report emphasizes that the company's revenue is heavily dependent on Starlink's ongoing expansion.. John Belton, a portfolio manager at Gabelli Funds, described SpaceX as the quintessential growth stock, noting that the investment narrative is long-term and the stock may need time to stabilize in public markets.

The $28.5 Trillion Addressable Market and the AI Play

One of the most striking figures in SpaceX's regulatory filing, as reported by the source, is the company's claim of a total addressable market amounting to $28.5 trillion — nearly 88 percent of U.S. GDP. Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX's president and chief operating officer, told CNBC that the firm also competes in the artificial intelligence sector, contributing to that massive estimate. 'We are builders. We build our own launch vehicles, we build our launch sites, and we're building data centers both on the ground as well as in orbit soon,' Shotwell explained. The source report notes that this AI component broadens SpaceX's competitive landscape beyond rocketry and satellite broadband.

Comparisons to Meta's Post-IPO Dip and Amazon's Long-Term Run

The source report draws parallels between SpaceX's debut and the IPO of Meta Platforms (then Facebook), which saw its shares fall from $38 to $18 post-listing and end the year below the IPO price. Conversely, Nancy Tengler, CEO of Laffer Tengler Investments, compared SpaceX to Amazon , whose stock has appreciated over 243,000 percent since its own IPO. Tengler posed critical questions for investors about their time horizon and conviction in the underlying technology. The source report also notes that retail enthusiasm was high, with Shotwell attributing this to Musk's vision of democratizing access to space.

What a Weak First-Day Surge Could Mean for OpenAI and Anthropic's Debuts

Ben Narasin, founder of Tenacity Venture Capital, described the near-term stock performance as a 'coin flip,' according to the source. He warned that if SpaceX's shares fail to experience a significant first-day price surge, it could cast a pall over the pipeline of subsequent mega-IPOs, including those of OpenAI (valued at over $1 trillion) and Anthropic (valued at $965 billion), both slated for later in the summer. The source report identifies this as a key open question: whether weak demand for SpaceX shares in the early days would delay or dampen the market entries of these AI companies. Additionally, speculation about a potential merger between Tesla and SpaceX remains unconfirmed, with the source noting that short-term venture capital sentiment is cautious.