SpaceX has hauled in $75 billion from a record-setting IPO, turning Elon Musk’s rocket shop into a listed-market beast.
According to the Financial Times, trading is due to start on today after SpaceX priced 555.6 million shares at $135 each. The haul could climb to $86 billion if underwriters use a greenshoe option to sell extra shares, giving the outfit a $1.78 trillion valuation.
The listing shows investors are still throwing cash at anything with AI fumes coming out of it. It could set up listings from Claude maker Anthropic and ChatGPT developer OpenAI later this year. It also hints that there are still investors who believe in Musk’s pie-in-the-sky promises, even though they have yet to see cheap robots or colonies on Mars.
SpaceX drew orders for more than three times the shares on offer, according to people familiar with the deal. Huge asset managers, Gulf sovereign wealth funds, hedge funds and retail punters all piled in.
Individual investors placed orders worth more than $100 billion and are expected to get 20 to 25 per cent of the shares sold. Bank of America handled the US retail chunk of the deal.
Musk has long wanted smaller shareholders closer to the centre of SpaceX ownership. That means fewer shares for the big accounts that usually get the velvet rope treatment in IPOs.
The IPO lands during a twitchy week for US markets and a stock-sale binge among the cocaine-nosed jobs on Wall Street.
Alphabet moved to raise about $85 billion last week, while the FT has reported that Meta has looked at a large share sale. SpaceX plans to shove the money into AI infrastructure and new satellite constellations.
A $20 billion slice must go towards repaying a bridge loan SpaceX took out in March. That followed Musk’s merger of his debt-laden AI and social media businesses into the rocket and satellite group.
“We’re embarking on a massive new growth phase, and we need capital for that,” Musk told JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon during an IPO roadshow event.
Musk said that “doing AI data centres in space” would be “another massive capital endeavour,” but claimed it was the best way around Earth’s energy limits. This week, he showed off a sketch of the first AI satellite with a 70-metre wingspan.
Those orbital AI data centres sit at the centre of Musk’s claimed $28.5 trillion addressable market. They are doing plenty of work to justify a valuation that would make even seasoned bubble-watchers reach for a stiff drink.
At $1.78 trillion, loss-making SpaceX becomes the priciest member of the world’s top 10 most valuable companies. It trades at 92 times its $19 billion revenue from the past year.
Goldman analysts have predicted SpaceX AI revenue could rise 100-fold to $322 billion by 2030.
