$135 a share. That is the number SpaceX settled on, and at that price the company has pulled in $75bn (about £56bn) from financial institutions ahead of its trading debut on the Nasdaq this Friday, according to a regulatory document the company submitted to securities authorities in Washington. The figure matches the estimate SpaceX floated last week. It implies an opening market value of roughly $1.8tn, which would make it, on day one, one of the most valuable public companies anywhere and the largest stock listing ever recorded.
If the shares hold at or above $135 when trading opens, Elon Musk, already the richest person alive, would cross a threshold no one has reached before: the world's first trillionaire. That phrase has hovered over the financial press for weeks. The math behind it is not especially mysterious. Musk's combined stake, paper wealth tied to a company most ordinary investors have never been allowed near, simply gets repriced the moment the market opens.
The SpaceX IPO and the price it's chasing
The $135 figure is only a starting line. Once the SpaceX IPO begins trading, the public price gets sorted out through what is, in effect, an open auction, and the outcome depends on how many shares are released and how badly people want them. There is reason to think demand will run hot. Oppenheimer, the global brokerage, set a target of $190 a share on Thursday, well above the listing price. Several other analysts have pitched their estimates higher than $135 too.
Retail interest, in particular, looks unusually strong. The British portion of the offering, by current estimates, will hand retail investors something in the region of £1.5bn in stock, and brokers across the country have reported a surge in new account openings. Simon Belsham of Hargreaves Lansdown said the listing might be "a first foray into investing" for many of the platform's clients, while acknowledging it would not suit everyone. That is a careful way of saying a lot of first-time buyers may be wading in on the strength of a name rather than a balance sheet.
There is a quieter point worth making. Even people who never click "buy" will likely end up owning a slice of SpaceX through pension funds and index holdings, the ordinary plumbing of retirement savings. Whether they wanted exposure to a company sitting at the intersection of rockets, AI and geopolitics or not, many of them will get it.
Who actually controls the company
Going public usually means surrendering some control. Not here. Through a mix of Class A and Class B stock, Musk will hold roughly 40% of SpaceX's equity but command more than 84% of the voting power, an arrangement that leaves him with near-total authority over the firm even as outside shareholders pour in their money. For comparison, Mark Zuckerberg runs Meta on a similar dual-class structure and still controls only about 60% of the vote. Musk's grip is far tighter.
The practical consequence, flagged in an analysis from Harvard Law School, is that SpaceX will not even be required to seat any independent directors on its board, people with no personal or financial stake in the outcome. The Harvard analysis warns that this concentration carries real risk for investors, because insiders could approve deals involving other Musk-controlled businesses, set his compensation, and broadly run the company as they see fit. Even if Musk eventually sold off some of his Class A shares, padding his fortune further, his Class B holdings would keep his lock on control intact.
That last detail is not hypothetical. SpaceX has already absorbed xAI, Musk's artificial intelligence startup, which had itself swallowed the social platform X, the site he bought as Twitter back in 2022. So the corporate web of Musk-owned entities folding into one another is established practice, not a future worry. Investors buying in on Friday are, frankly, buying into a structure where their say is close to symbolic.
More than rockets
It is tempting to read SpaceX as a launch company, and the imagery certainly invites it. On 13 October 2024, at the Starbase site near Boca Chica on the Texas coast, the largest rocket ever built lifted off over the Gulf of Mexico. The launch was not the headline, though. Minutes later the enormous booster fell back toward the pad, reignited its engines, slowed itself, and was caught mid-air by a pair of mechanical arms the engineers nicknamed Mechazilla, or the chopsticks. Nothing like it had been pulled off before. Musk told his followers it was a step toward reusable rockets that would gut the cost of reaching orbit, the Moon, and eventually Mars.
The prospectus leans into that romance, opening with a mission statement about making life multiplanetary and extending "the light of consciousness to the stars." Stirring stuff. And yet the financial story underneath is, increasingly, about artificial intelligence as much as propulsion. As the BBC's business editor Simon Jack put it, the company is a wager on AI swallowing big chunks of the global economy, and the success or failure of this listing becomes a referendum on whether that optimism holds.
Not everyone is sold. Sinead O'Sullivan, an economist who previously worked for Nasa, told the BBC she views the venture as "an Elon Musk ego project," and the comparison some critics reach for is Icarus, the founder flying too close to the sun. Tom Mueller, SpaceX's first employee and now head of his own firm, Impulse Space, struck a warmer note, telling the BBC's Michelle Fleury that the company's rise has been an incredible ride. Mueller, who left in 2020, still holds a sizeable financial stake, so his enthusiasm comes with a footnote.
A test case for the AI giants
The timing here is hard to ignore. SpaceX is listing just as a cluster of private firms valued near or above $1tn, including Anthropic and OpenAI, have signalled they are preparing their own public offerings, possibly within the year. That makes this debut something of a dress rehearsal for the whole crop. If retail investors and the broader market embrace a company priced at $1.8tn on the strength of vision and a charismatic founder, the AI labs waiting in the wings will take note. If the shares wobble, that is a signal too. The history of marquee technology listings offers cautionary precedent on both counts: some, like Facebook in 2012, stumbled out of the gate before recovering, while others never grew into the valuations their debuts implied. A market willing to underwrite $1.8tn on promise rather than profit is a market that has, at least for now, decided the upside is worth the wager — a judgement that has been wrong before.
There is a larger question humming underneath all of it, and the BBC reporting raised it directly: the steady concentration of economic and, by extension, political power inside a handful of American mega-corporations, several of them now tethered to one man. A company that builds the rockets the US government relies on, runs a satellite network blanketing the globe, owns a major social media platform, and is folding an AI lab into the same corporate parent is not an ordinary business proposition. It sits, as Jack noted, at the crossroads of technology and geopolitics.
What happens Friday morning will be measured in dollars and a share price. But the thing worth watching is not whether Musk clears the trillion-dollar mark, which looks close to a formality. It is whether the public markets, and the regulators behind them, are comfortable handing that much value to a structure where the man at the top answers to almost no one. That is the harder ledger, and it will not settle by the closing bell.