SpaceX IPO: shares of Elon Musk's space company became available

Preliminary trading of SpaceX shares starts in the trading system for Freedom clients. The IPO of the space company may become the largest in history and bring its founder Elon Musk closer to the status of the world's only trillionaire.

SpaceX shares will be available on Freedom every day starting June 10 from 15:00 to 01:00 Astana time until the offering. On Friday, June 12, the securities are expected to begin trading on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX.

SpaceX, which owns a network of satellites Starlink, social network X and chatbot Grok, intends to place on Nasdaq 555.6 million shares at $ 135 per piece, which will allow it to raise $ 75 billion. At the end of the IPO capitalization could reach about $ 1.77 trillion, writes CNBC. In case of successful placement Musk's fortune will reach $988 billion, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index data.

The main organizers of the IPO are Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase. In total, the syndicate included 23 banks, including Barclays, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Mizuho, Macquarie and Royal Bank of Canada.

SpaceX's IPO is expected to be the largest in history. The record now belongs to oil company Saudi Aramco, which raised about $29 billion in 2019.

The company will use the proceeds from the IPO to develop the Starlink network, rocket program, Starship project and other initiatives related to artificial intelligence and space infrastructure.

SpaceX was founded by billionaire Elon Musk in 2002 with money from the sale of PayPal. Today, the company has become the largest operator of space launches in the world, develops the Starlink satellite internet and, after the purchase of xAI, is also working in the field of artificial intelligence.

The company's journey began with a series of failures. The first three launches of the Falcon 1 rocket ended in accidents, but in 2008 SpaceX was the first private company to launch a liquid-fueled rocket into orbit. In the same year, the company was awarded a $1.6 billion NASA contract to supply the International Space Station.

In 2012, SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft became the first private spacecraft to dock with the ISS. Eight years later, SpaceX was the first private company to deliver astronauts to the ISS, bringing manned space launches back to the United States for the first time since the Space Shuttle program ended.

One of the company's major achievements has been its reusable rocket technology. In 2015, SpaceX first reused the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket, making the reuse of boosters a standard practice over time. This has dramatically reduced the cost of launches. In total, SpaceX has completed about 660 missions, and its reusable boosters have been reused 583 times - figures that no competitor has been able to come close to, Barron's writes.

Today, the bulk of SpaceX's business is commercial launches and the Starlink satellite internet service. It is these that provide the majority of the company's revenue and have made it the largest player in space services.

The next stage should be the project of reusable super-heavy rocket Starship, on the development of which SpaceX has spent more than $15 billion Musk expects to use it for NASA's lunar program, the launch of new generations of satellites Starlink and in the future - for flights to Mars.

Musk has been bundling his assets around artificial intelligence in recent years. After buying Twitter in 2022 and creating startup xAI in 2023, SpaceX this year acquired xAI in a deal that valued the combined entity at $1.25 trillion. It is this ecosystem of space, satellite and AI businesses that is going public.

One of Musk's most ambitious projects is building orbital data centers for AI. In its IPO filing, SpaceX said it was considering building computing infrastructure in orbit, and Musk said the money raised would help fund the launch of up to 1 million satellites to put AI capacity in space. The company acknowledges that the technology is untested and may not be commercially viable yet.

Last year, SpaceX had revenue of $18.7 billion and a net loss of $4.9 billion.

- The fair value of SpaceX is $780 billion - half its valuation on the over-the-counter market, Morningstar said. However, soon after the IPO quotations may "gain height", write his analysts. This will be facilitated by the low volume of securities in free circulation (about 3%), their promotion by "almost every investment bank on the planet," investor appetite for AI and unprecedented rapid inclusion in the Nasdaq 100 index, the agency said. The optimal entry point for the position will take shape in a few months, when venture capitalists and SpaceX employees will have the opportunity to sell their shares, Morningstar said.

- "Fans of Elon Musk have been raising Tesla's valuation well above fundamentally sound levels. The same thing could happen to SpaceX," said ERShares Chief Investment Officer Joel Shulman, whose opinion is cited by Business Insider. - I would recommend staying away from this IPO".

- "Investors are focused on the rocket business and Starlink's subscriber base," Business Insider quoted Deepwater Asset Management managing partner Gene Munster as saying. - They're missing the truth. SpaceX, through a constellation of companies controlled by Musk, has quietly assembled the only set of assets capable of creating a fully sovereign AI." By "sovereign AI" he means a fully autonomous ecosystem that is independent of third-party vendors at key stages - from computing power to data feeds to user services. According to Munster, this could be SpaceX's main advantage.

- SpaceX shares will attract big buyers - primarily funds that focus on the Nasdaq 100 index, Mark Spiegel, head of Stanphyl Capital Partners and one of Tesla's longtime critics, told Reuters. He considers SpaceX a "grotesquely overvalued" company, but is not ready to short the company's shares and prefers to take a wait-and-see attitude.

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Freedom clients will be able to access SpaceX shares in pre-market mode. Deals will be available from 15:00 to 01:00 Astana time - from June 10 until the IPO (scheduled for June 12). Thereafter, trading will follow the U.S. stock market schedule. To participate, click on the ticker SPCX.US.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor