SpaceX is now public | Seaside

SpaceX is now a publicly traded company.

The IPO is historic for many reasons: SpaceX hopes to raise $75 billion under the symbol SPCX, which would make it the largest public offering in history. The company is controlled by Musk, who also runs Tesla, another trillion dollar company. The IPO is expected to make Musk, who is expected to control 85 percent of the voting shares, the world’s first trillionaire. But marketers may struggle to buy into this vision, as Bloomberg recently reported that the IPO has attracted demand of more than four times the existing shares.

The investment is a reflection of the excitement surrounding the SpaceX mission. The company controls about 82 percent of all US properties and controls about half of the global retail market. Starlink, its satellite internet business, is a huge cash cow, having passed 10 million subscribers worldwide earlier this year.

SpaceX was valued at $1.25 trillion earlier this year after it merged with xAI, Musk’s AI company that also owns X.com, formerly Twitter. The merger meant investors would be buying at a higher price — but Musk merged the companies at a higher price for himself and SpaceX.

The first steps were taken in May, when SpaceX filed its prospectus S-1 with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. In it, the company laid out its plans for a future rocket launch, a permanent Mars crew, and a data center to improve its AI capabilities. In typical Musk fashion, many of these plans remain out of reach.

S-1 also detailed all the procedures Musk enriches himself by creating himself. Tesla owns about 19 million shares of SpaceX’s Class A common stock, which is less than 1 percent of the total stock outstanding. Tesla’s stake in xAI was later converted into SpaceX shares Elon Musk merged his AI company with his aerospace company in February. SpaceX buys Cybertrucks and Megapacks from Tesla, and leases office space to the Boring Company. The S-1 also names Musk himself as a threat, noting that his other companies could compete with SpaceX for valuable resources.

SpaceX is also unprofitable. It lost about $4.9 billion in 2025 and burned another billion in the first quarter of 2026, mostly due to spending on big AI tools. At its peak, the $75 billion raised from the IPO could be liquidated within 2.5 years.

Even if you are not buying the property directly, you can have it soon. As our own Liz Lopatto explained recentlyNasdaq changed its rules to allow large companies to enter the Nasdaq 100 index after 15 trading days instead of waiting for the December breakdown of the year. This means that popular ETFs will be forced to buy billions of dollars of SpaceX after its launch.