SpaceX made history with a US$75 billion IPO that instantly turned it into one of the biggest public companies in the world. Now it has to win over the market.

Friday’s trading will be a critical test for the US$1.8 trillion rocket, satellite and artificial intelligence company and Elon Musk , its founder. Even after raising the largest-ever amount in an IPO, SpaceX still needs the market’s validation of its ambition to dominate AI and carry humans to the moon and Mars, as well as the company’s controversial governance regime that promises Musk near-total control.

SpaceX shares opened at US$150 each, 11 per cent above their offering price after they began trading in New York on Friday, valuing the rocket and AI-company Elon Musk founded at roughly US$2 trillion.

Musk’s fortune now stands at the once-unimaginable figure of almost US$1.05 trillion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That’s more than three times that of the world’s second-richest person, Google co-founder Larry Page.

The IPO was more than four times oversubscribed on Thursday, Bloomberg News reported. The company’s unusual move to set a fixed price and size left bankers unable to capture surging interest, leaving a vast group of would-be buyers jockeying for whatever they can get and potentially setting up a roaring first day for the stock.

Still, the unprecedented size of SpaceX’s debut makes the market mechanics more complicated, and the fear of unexpected glitches like the ones that derailed Facebook’s IPO in 2012 is guaranteed to keep executives on edge. The first trading day will not only set the tone for future sessions, it will affect the prospects for a pair of potential giant initial public offerings from SpaceX’s AI rivals Anthropic PBC and OpenAI .

“It presages a pretty sizable wave of IPOs,” John Waldron, president of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., said during a Bloomberg Television interview with Francine Lacqua. “The capital markets are willing to finance these extraordinary companies as we build out AI infrastructure.”

Index, retail tailwinds

Among the unsatisfied investors whose IPO allocation potentially fell short of their desired amount are retail buyers. That cohort delivered more than US$100 billion of demand, the majority of which likely hasn’t been met. Another tailwind for the stock will be forced buying by index-tracking funds which could generate as much as US$6 billion in demand as they snap up shares ahead of the stock’s expected fast-track inclusion in benchmark gauges, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.

A large IPO is no guarantee of a standout session, however, and the fragile sentiment around newly listed companies means some never recover from trading below their offer price on day one. Even some firms that soar after their IPOs fail to maintain the momentum.

For U.S. IPOs raising at least US$1 billion, the record for the biggest day-one gain belongs to design software maker Figma Inc., which rose 250 per cent in its 2025 debut, data compiled by Bloomberg show. It gave up the increase and is now about 41 per cent below its IPO price.

Stablecoin firm Circle Internet Group Inc., another listing from 2025, climbed 168 per cent on its first day. It remains at roughly the same level above the IPO price.

Companies with negative net income tend to lag by more than 10 per cent over the first 18 months after their listing compared with profitable peers, according to a Trivariate Research report last year. SpaceX had a net loss of US$4.28 billion in the first quarter of 2026.

At least some of the price action in post-IPO trading is due to the relatively small number of shares made available. SpaceX’s IPO is an outlier even by normal standards, with roughly 4.2 per cent of its outstanding shares available to trade on day one.

While a small float can lead to volatility for the company, some are more concerned about what happens to the broader market when insiders are able to sell more stock as so-called lock-up agreements expire.

“The tricky part for me is as the float unlocks, how that’s absorbed over time,” said Jeremiah Buckley, a portfolio manager with Janus Henderson Investors.

“I don’t think absorbing a $75 billion IPO is that impactful, but if we’re talking about absorbing a trillion dollars in float that needs to come from somewhere and that makes me more nervous,” Buckley said.

Tesla merger

SpaceX’s early performance is likely to play an outsize role in what many investors see as Musk’s endgame — a merger with Tesla Inc. , creating a long-discussed Elon Inc. that would let investors buy into a single company that combines all of the chief executive’s visions of robots, autonomous cars, AI and data centres in space in one stock.

While nothing has been formally announced, investors pushed the company to consider a SpaceX-Tesla merger in January, Bloomberg News reported, before the xAI deal was made public. A tie-up after SpaceX’s IPO is just a matter of time, early investor Peter Diamandis told Bloomberg TV in May.

The two companies’ businesses are already entangled. Almost one in five Cybertrucks that Tesla sold in the fourth quarter of 2025 went to SpaceX or Musk’s other firms. Some of Musk’s most ambitious projects — such as Terafab, a bid to produce semiconductors for AI development — will require Tesla and SpaceX to commit tens of billions of dollars before they can be realized.

A Tesla-SpaceX merger looks far from assured in the medium term, Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Steve Man said in a note Wednesday.

“Benefits from Terafab chip work, the Macrohard software development project and any Tesla role in space exploration are years away,” Man said.

If SpaceX shares retreat in the coming weeks, it might actually help make a merger more palatable to Tesla shareholders, according to Morningstar analysts.

“With SpaceX’s soaring valuation leading up to its IPO, we doubt Tesla shareholders would want to buy SpaceX while its valuation multiples are far higher than theirs,” they said Tuesday.

“Though we expect some Tesla shareholders will also be keen owners of SpaceX stock, new public owners of SpaceX stock would likely not agree to such a steep discount to the IPO price unless SpaceX shares fell closer to our $63 per share fair value estimate,” the analysts said.

With Wall Street already lining up to give SpaceX price targets of as much as US$190, the debate over Musk’s dream of making humans a multiplanetary species is about to begin.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley, Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. led the deal with 18 other banks participating. The company formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp. will debut on Nasdaq and Nasdaq Texas Friday under the symbol SPCX.

—With assistance from Anthony Hughes, Demetrios Pogkas, Jennah Haque, Eric Johnson and Francine Lacqua.

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Bloomberg.com