NEW YORK—The price is $135 a share, fixed, take it or leave it. The ticker is SPCX. And the order book, according to people familiar with the matter, has already passed $150 billion, more than twice the shares on offer.
SpaceX is set to price the largest initial public offering in history on June 11 and begin trading on the Nasdaq the following day. The company, controlled by Elon Musk, aims to raise up to $75 billion at a valuation approaching $1.75 trillion, a number that would make it one of the largest companies in the U.S. stock market on day one.
The road to the debut has been anything but quiet. On June 9, Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat and ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, sent a 12-page letter to Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Paul Atkins urging the agency to delay the offering. Warren cited concerns about the company’s valuation, its governance structure and the risk that index funds would be forced to buy shares in a company whose controlling shareholder holds outsized voting power.
The letter landed as SpaceX was finalizing one of the most unusual IPO mechanics in memory. Rather than testing demand with a price range, the company set a single price and told investors to take it. It also carved out a larger-than-typical allocation for retail buyers, about 30% of the offering, or roughly $22.5 billion, according to people familiar with the terms. Fidelity Investments lowered its minimum order from $500,000 to $2,000, opening the deal to millions of individual investors.
Warren’s objections go to the structure of the company itself. Musk serves as chief executive, chief technology officer and chairman, and controls the majority of voting power through a dual-class share structure that gives him outsized say over the company’s future. The letter describes the arrangement as leaving shareholders with few avenues for recourse, and notes that the company requires mandatory arbitration for shareholder disputes. It also questions the accounting around SpaceX’s combination earlier this year with xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, a merger that created a $1.25 trillion entity and added an AI-compute business to the rocket maker’s operations.
The senator’s concern about passive investors is grounded in mechanics. Both the Nasdaq and FTSE Russell changed their index-entry rules this spring to let newly listed megacaps join their benchmarks quickly, and SpaceX would qualify for the Nasdaq-100 within days of trading. Index funds that track those benchmarks would have little choice but to buy the stock, whatever its price. The S&P Dow Jones committee, after considering similar changes, said in early June it would not waive its seasoning requirements for SpaceX, a small brake on the passive wave.
None of this has slowed demand. The offering is oversubscribed by more than two times, with sovereign wealth funds, mutual funds and wealthy individuals all seeking allocations. SpaceX’s business, which combines satellite internet through Starlink, launch services for governments and companies, and the AI-compute operations inherited from xAI, generated about $19 billion in revenue over the past year, a figure critics note is small relative to a $1.75 trillion price tag.
The stakes for Musk are personal. His holdings in SpaceX are worth an estimated $700 billion at the offering valuation, and a successful debut could make him the world’s first trillionaire, depending on how the shares trade. The offering would also give him a public currency for the next phase of his ambitions, from Mars missions to the expansion of the Colossus AI data centers.
For the market, the debut is a test of appetite for a new kind of company: a private giant that reached public markets only after two decades of internal growth, whose financial statements are dominated by forward-looking contracts rather than current profits, and whose fate is tied to the judgment of a single founder. Underwriters led by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup and J.P. Morgan have spent weeks convincing investors that the valuation is justified.
The SEC has given no public indication of whether it will act on Warren’s request. The registration statement was declared effective on June 11, clearing the way for pricing, and the company closed its offering on June 15, raising about $85.7 billion including the underwriters’ overallotment. The shares began trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market and Nasdaq Texas under the ticker SPCX, as scheduled.
The debate Warren opened will outlive the first day of trading. Questions about how public markets price companies built on founder control, speculative missions and AI hype are not going away, and SpaceX is the largest experiment yet in answering them. The company’s next quarterly report, due in August, will give investors their first look at the financial reality behind the biggest listing in history.
