SpaceX’s full IPO, aimed at raising $86 billion
SpaceX yesterday filed the full prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for its planned initial public offering (IPO) of stock, revealing a plan to sell 555.6K shares at $135 per share, resulting in a total cash acquisition of just over $75 billion. Additionally, the company’s earlier investors will have separate options to buy other shares, raising about $11 billion more, for a total of $86 billion in capital raised.
The stock offering would set SpaceX’s value at about $1.77 trillion, and would make Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire. This would also be the largest IPO in history. The full prospectus at the link above has a lot of details, which this CNN article distills nicely:
SpaceX plans to sell 555.6 million shares at an initial price of $135 a share, the company said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The decision to dictate one price target, as opposed to offering a range, is a unique move that reflects the hot IPO market around the AI craze and Musk’s own tendency for mega-scale goals.
Musk, who currently owns half of SpaceX, would still control nearly half of the company’s total shares after the offering. However, some of those are special shares with greater voting power, and Musk will control 82.4% of the voting power after the IPO, according to the filing.
The date of this IPO, when stocks will go on sale, is presently set for June 12, 2026. The stock will be traded on Nasdaq, under the label SPCX.
In addition to this $86 billion, SpaceX already earns about $12 billion per year from its more than 10 million Starlink subscribers, and has previously raised more then $12 billion from those initial private investors. All told, the company will have more than $110 billion in cash on hand after this IPO. That is more than four times NASA’s annual budget.
As I have said repeatedly in the past two years, SpaceX is the real American space program. NASA is begin carried along by it.
One detail of interest revealed in some viewgraphs that SpaceX is showing to potential investors is its intention to begin launching commercial payloads on Starship before the end of this year. In other words, expect much more frequent flights in the coming months, moving quickly to orbital tests, placing operational version 3 Starlink satellites in orbit as well as testing refueling in orbit involving two week missions and two Starships.
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I’m in for a few shares. I’m just not sure of my strategy. The stock price may take off like a rocket from the IPO day and keep going up. But the stock price may go up for weeks or months and then drop for a period of time before growing at a more realistic rate.
I am terrible at picking individual stocks and therefore have most of my investments with an advisor. The rest I have in a Nasdaq index fund. I have a few bucks in a blow money account that I play around with individual stocks and that’s what I’ll use to buy a few shares of SpaceX with. It’s interesting that the big winners I’ve bought I didn’t learn about on investing forums, but political and science forums. When someone says something like “As I have said repeatedly in the past two years, SpaceX is the real American space program.”, I take note.
There are a lot of things that can go wrong. The AI / orbital data centers not succeeding, a Starship blowing up, Elon Musk saying something crazy that spooks investors, etc.
So personally I think I’ll wait a few months and then start buying a few shares at a time over the following year, but I’ll be the first to admit that strategy may be horrible. So don’t follow my strategy. I am terrible at picking individual stocks.
James Street: My sense is that the value of SpaceX’s share will mostly increase with time. I think you should start your incremental buying right from the beginning.
I however am no expert on the stock market, and in fact am a bad source of advice. I don’t trade or invest in anything (my only owned shares are a tiny amount of AT&T shares given to me at my Bar Mitzvah 60 years ago). I also know little about stock investing in general.
One of the things they showed off is asteroid mining. With that and everything else they’re doing, they may well become the modern equivalent of the Dutch East India Company in size and importance to the economy.