SpaceX set a fixed price of $135 a share for its initial public offering Wednesday, locking in a $75 billion fundraise, a $1.77 trillion valuation and a Nasdaq debut on June 12 that would be the largest stock-market listing ever recorded. The rocket maker disclosed the price in an amended prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The deal would more than triple the $26 billion Saudi Aramco raised in 2019, the previous record, and instantly make SpaceX the seventh-most-valuable U.S. company, ahead of Tesla at about $1.6 trillion. It would also push Chief Executive Elon Musk's paper wealth past $1 trillion. Forbes values his net worth at $826 billion; SpaceX's filing puts his stake in the company alone at $866.5 billion at the offer price.
The mechanics
SpaceX plans to sell 555.6 million shares under the ticker SPCX, with underwriters holding an option to take an additional 83.33 million shares worth $11.2 billion. Goldman Sachs is the lead banker, followed by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase. Setting a single price rather than a range is unusual at the roadshow stage and follows what CNBC described as testing-the-waters meetings with institutional investors.
Musk will hold 82.4 percent of the voting power after the offering, primarily through 5.22 billion Class B shares that carry 10 votes apiece. He is locked up for 366 days, after which the prospectus says he "will not be subject to any obligation to maintain his ownership interest in us."
On the Street
The pricing has already moved adjacent securities. Options volume in EchoStar, the Colorado networking company that owns an estimated 3 percent of SpaceX, ran more than three times its monthly average Wednesday, with about 60,000 contracts traded for nearly $50 million in premium, according to Cboe LiveVol data cited by CNBC.
The debut also kicks off a queue of long-delayed technology listings. Anthropic filed its confidential IPO prospectus with the SEC on Monday at a valuation near $1 trillion, and OpenAI is preparing its own paperwork. Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities, quoted by CBS News, called the SpaceX listing "the first major test for public markets after years of muted IPO activity."
The counterpoint
The fundamentals and governance are unusually stretched. SpaceX lost $2.6 billion from operations last year on $18.67 billion in revenue, a fraction of trillion-dollar peers: Meta cleared $200 billion and Tesla about $95 billion. The prospectus pitches a future built on a Mars colony of "at least one million inhabitants" and as much as $26.5 trillion in artificial-intelligence revenue, partly from orbital data centers the company concedes are not yet possible. Musk's 82.4 percent voting block leaves public shareholders with effectively no say, and IDC analyst Arnal Dayaratna told CBS News that his xAI chatbot Grok is "less impressive than anything that we see from any other major player in the space." Tesla shares fell 65 percent in 2022 before rebounding.
SpaceX expects to begin trading on the Nasdaq as soon as June 12. Dan Ives told CBS News he expects Tesla and SpaceX to merge next year.