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Nasdaq staged a dual opening bell for the first time in its history on Friday: executives on the floor in Times Square, Elon Musk behind a Nasdaq-branded podium in Starbase, Texas. Hours later, SPCX still hadn’t printed a single official trade. On a crypto derivatives exchange, it had been trading all morning.
That inversion, the price arriving before the market that’s supposed to set it, is the most interesting thing about the largest initial public offering ever completed. And almost nobody is talking about it.
The Largest IPO Ever, By a Multiple
The headline numbers first, because they are genuinely without precedent. SpaceX priced 555.6 million shares at $135 on Thursday night, raising $75 billion and valuing the company at roughly $1.78 trillion, per the company’s announcement. That doesn’t edge past Saudi Aramco’s 2019 record of about $29 billion. It multiplies it by two and a half. Underwriters hold a greenshoe of roughly 83 million additional shares worth around $11.2 billion if demand requires it, Yahoo Finance reported, and demand apparently requires it: the book came in more than three times oversubscribed, with Reuters putting retail orders alone near $70 billion against an expected 20 percent retail allocation.
Put that in context. All 71 IPOs completed in 2026 before this one raised $35.7 billion combined, per Kiplinger’s tally. SpaceX raised more than double the entire year’s IPO market in a single evening.
What investors are buying is no longer just a rocket company. Since absorbing Musk’s xAI in February, SpaceX is a conglomerate spanning launch, the Starlink satellite network, the social platform X and the Grok AI business, and its filings claim a market opportunity above $28 trillion. Van Ha Trinh, markets analyst at Exness, points out that 90 percent of that figure is attributed to xAI alone. Worth holding onto that detail, because as CNN noted in its debut coverage, Starlink remains the only division that actually turns a profit. Musk keeps roughly 42 percent of the company, which is why a strong aftermarket could plausibly make him the first trillionaire.
The Price That Traded Before the Price
While Morgan Stanley’s stabilization desk spent Friday morning walking indications from $169 to $165 and back toward $175, a parallel market had already settled the question. The SPCX-USDC perpetual futures contract on Hyperliquid traded around $176 early Friday, about 30 percent above the IPO price, before easing toward $172, per CNBC. Crypto traders weren’t waiting for Nasdaq’s price discovery. They were front-running it, with leverage, on an offshore venue that never closes.
This is becoming a pattern rather than a curiosity. Prediction and crypto markets priced the Iran strikes before the missiles flew, something we documented when six wallets made a million dollars on Polymarket before the first explosion. And it’s the resolution of a setup we flagged on Monday, when we wrote about the proxy trap forming around pre-IPO SpaceX exposure. The trap hasn’t sprung the way proxy holders hoped. EchoStar, which holds an estimated 3 percent of SpaceX, jumped 11 percent on Thursday with options volume running eleven times its 30-day average per Cboe LiveVol data, then added another 5 percent in Friday’s premarket. AST SpaceMobile rose 12 percent alongside nearly $140 million in options trading. The proxies are still inflating into the listing rather than deflating out of it, which tells you the marginal buyer doesn’t think the story ends at the first print.
The Sceptics Have a Number, and It’s $63
Morningstar published the most uncomfortable piece of research on Wall Street this week: a fair value estimate of $63 per share, a 53 percent discount to the IPO price before the first trade even occurred. Chief equity strategist Michael Field called the valuation “extremely speculative” in a statement to ABC News, acknowledging real strength in Starlink while arguing that too much of the price rests on unknown, untested technologies, particularly inside the AI business.
If the indications hold near $170, the market is paying nearly three times Morningstar’s estimate of what the business is worth. History offers limited comfort. CBS News reviewed past splashy debuts ahead of Friday and found the familiar arc: a violent opening pop, then gravity.
The AI complex has its own recent warning. Broadcom delivered a clean earnings beat last week and the Asian AI trade sold off anyway, hard. When positioning is this crowded, good news stops being enough. SpaceX is now the single largest expression of that positioning in public markets.
Everyone Owns It Anyway
Here’s where the policy machinery matters more than the order book. SpaceX lobbied both major index providers for fast-track inclusion, with mixed results. Nasdaq changed its rules in early May so that mega-cap listings can enter the Nasdaq-100 after just 15 trading days, per Al Jazeera’s reporting, putting SPCX on track for index entry in early July. S&P Dow Jones Indices declined to bend, keeping its four-quarters-of-profitability requirement for the S&P 500.
The consequence is that passive money starts buying on a schedule, regardless of price. North Carolina’s treasurer Brad Briner told CNBC the state’s pension fund for teachers, firefighters and police won’t take a direct stake because the offering is too expensive, then acknowledged the punchline himself: “We will ultimately participate in SpaceX through our index positions in our public equity.” Anyone holding a Nasdaq-100 tracker in a retirement account is weeks away from owning a slice of a company an established research house values at a third of its market price. Not by choice. By construction.
The float makes the mechanics sharper. Against roughly 13 billion shares implied by the $1.78 trillion valuation, the 555.6 million sold represent barely 4 percent of the company, closer to 5 with the greenshoe. Index funds forced to buy a sliver of free float in a stock everyone already owns synthetically is how you get price action with no relationship to the Morningstar spreadsheet, in either direction.
What the First Print Actually Decides
Friday’s open settles bragging rights, not the argument. The argument arrives in three parts: the Nasdaq-100 inclusion window in July, the lockup expiries behind that 4 percent float, and the two filings sitting at the SEC behind this one, because OpenAI and Anthropic have both started the paperwork for their own listings later this year, per NPR. SpaceX is the proof of concept for whether public markets will fund the AI buildout at private-market prices.
It’s worth noticing where the speculative energy came from. Bitcoin spent the week clawing back above $63,000, roughly half its October peak, while crypto-native traders bid Musk’s equity 30 percent above its issue price on perpetual futures. The appetite for risk never left the system. It changed tickers. The market is telling you what it wants to believe in next, and on Friday it paid a record $75 billion for the privilege.
