SpaceX rings the bell on its Nasdaq debut, and Musk admits he gave it ‘less than a 10% chance’

SpaceX rang the Nasdaq opening bell on Friday, marking its Nasdaq debut as a public company with the largest IPO on record. It did so in typical fashion. Hours earlier, a Falcon 9 rocket had launched a batch of Starlink satellites into orbit.

“What other company would do something like that on the day it opens on the public market?” SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell asked from the Nasdaq site in New York. “SpaceX would.”

A near-$1bn vote of confidence

The debut values SpaceX at just under $1.8tn. The company sold 555.6 million shares at $135 each, raising about $75bn, the biggest IPO in history. It trades under the ticker SPCX.

Shotwell said staff backed the listing with their own money. SpaceX employs about 22,000 people, and more than half bought additional stock in the offering, worth almost $1bn between them. “Thank you for that confidence,” she said.

Musk: ‘less than a 10% chance’

Elon Musk joined by video from Starbase, Texas, where thousands of employees were celebrating. He founded SpaceX in 2002, and on Friday he was frank about the odds he once gave it.

“I gave SpaceX less than a 10 per cent chance of succeeding,” Musk said. “We’re probably going to fail. But we should try anyway.” His pitch, as ever, was the mission: to “take the fiction out of science fiction” and carry ordinary people to the Moon and Mars.

Shotwell ran through the record: the first private liquid-fuelled rocket to orbit in 2008, astronauts sent to the International Space Station, 165 launches last year, and a giant rocket the company aims to fly to orbit and partly recover this year.

The cheer, and the caveats

The celebration rests on a contested price. The listing made Musk the first trillionaire on paper. But SpaceX lost nearly $5bn last year, and Morningstar puts fair value near $780bn, under half the listing price. A Danish pension fund blacklisted the IPO as overvalued and weak on governance.

Control is concentrated, too. The filing hands Musk dominant voting power, even over his own removal. The “gigawatt-class compute” Shotwell touted points to the xAI business SpaceX absorbed, folding Musk’s AI bet into the rocket company.

None of that dimmed the room. The debut also minted thousands of employee millionaires. “We are just getting started,” Shotwell said. The market will now test that promise in real time, every trading day.