SPCX IPO: SpaceX Shares Soar 11% In Nasdaq Debut — Elon Musk Is Officially The World’s First Trillionaire

• SpaceX’s market capitalization reached $2.2 trillion at the time of writing.
• Addressing employees at the Starbase launch site on Friday, Musk said that he gave SpaceX less than a 10% chance of succeeding when he founded the company in 2002.
• Musk said during an interaction with JPMorgan earlier this week that the company has been cash-flow positive since 2015.

Shares of Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SPCX) gained nearly 11% on their Nasdaq debut on Friday, catapulting SpaceX into the top ten firms in terms of the world’s most valuable companies by market capitalization.

SpaceX’s Nasdaq debut has also officially made CEO Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire.

SpaceX shares debuted on the Nasdaq at $150 and traded over 22% higher at $165 per share as of this writing, compared with its offer price of $135 per share.

SpaceX’s market capitalization stood at $2.2 trillion at the time of writing.

Retail sentiment on Stocktwits around SpaceX trended in the ‘extremely bullish’ territory at the time of writing. SPCX was the top trending ticker on the platform at the time of writing.

SpaceX Raised $75B Through IPO

SpaceX raised $75 billion through the IPO, issuing 555.55 million shares at $135 apiece. This makes it the world’s biggest IPO by a wide margin, eclipsing the nearly $29 billion raised by Saudi Aramco in 2019.

Musk said during an interaction with JPMorgan earlier this week that the company has been cash-flow positive since 2015. He said that he took SpaceX public to raise capital for its next major growth phase as it plans to place a million satellites in orbit, up from about 10,000 currently.

SpaceX also aims to build AI data centers in space, with Musk saying there is ample room to do so. "We've got a pretty good idea of how to operate, just really large constellations, and do it safely now, right? We are the only operator that has any experience of that scale,” he said.

Musk Gave SpaceX Less Than A 10% Chance Of Succeeding

Addressing employees at the Starbase launch site on Friday, Musk said that he gave SpaceX less than a 10% chance of succeeding when he founded the company in 2002. He added that he still had to give it a shot because of his vision of making humanity a spacefaring civilization.

“While the other aerospace companies build good rockets and everything, they were simply not pursuing the technology that’s necessary to make life multi-planetary… to make Star Trek… the exciting science-fiction futures that we’ve read about, real. That’s what SpaceX is all about… It’s to take the fiction out of science fiction,” he added.

Musk added that SpaceX wants to be able to take anyone who wants to go to the moon, Mars, or even beyond the solar system at some point, not just a few astronauts.

Wolfe Research Highlights SPCX’s Biggest Moat

According to a CNBC report, analysts at Wolfe Research highlighted that SpaceX’s biggest moat is its near monopoly on rocket launches. The firm initiated coverage of SpaceX with a $175 price target and an ‘Outperform’ rating.

It stated that SpaceX’s ability to reuse rockets gives it a cost advantage that helps it maintain its dominance.

“Successful reusability of Starship is the single most important value unlock. We don’t expect SpaceX to out-innovate Anthropic or OpenAI on the model side, but we expect SpaceX to build a cost advantage into the compute end game through verticalization and space access,” the firm said.

The Procure Space ETF (UFO) is up 104% during this period, while the Tema Space Innovators ETF (NASA) is up 33%.

Also See: Iran’s Draft Agreement With US Includes Release Of $24B In Frozen Assets, Nuclear Program Discussions: Report

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