‘I gave SpaceX less than a 10% chance of succeeding’: Elon Musk addresses Nasdaq ahead of SpaceX IPO

SpaceX began trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market and Nasdaq Texas under the ticker SPCX on Thursday, with its $75 billion IPO priced at $135 per share and valuing the company at $1.77 trillion, making it the largest stock market debut in history. CEO Elon Musk told Nasdaq that he initially gave SpaceX less than a 10% chance of succeeding, but now aims to take civilians to the moon and Mars. The offering instantly makes SpaceX the sixth-most valuable U.S. company despite posting a $4.9 billion net loss in 2025 on $18.7 billion in revenue.

Today could mark one of the biggest days in stock market history—or set the stage for one of its greatest flops. SpaceX https://fortune.com/company/spacex/ , the most hotly anticipated stock market debut ever, is set to be offered to the public any minute now as investors eagerly await its debut on both the Nasdaq https://fortune.com/company/nasdaq/ Global Select Market and Nasdaq Texas under the ticker SPCX, capping a 24-year run as the most valuable, and most scrutinized, private company in the world. Ahead of the debut, the rocket, satellite and AI company’s CEO Elon Musk addressed Nasdaq, saying the company has its sights set far beyond the earth’s borders. “SpaceX wants to be able to take you to the moon,” Musk said. “I am confident at this point that with the incredible team that we have here at SpaceX, that we will do that for you.” He told the crowd of SpaceX employees that at first, he didn’t have high hopes for the company that could potentially make him the world’s first trillionaire. “I gave SpaceX less than a 10% chance of succeeding at all.” “That’s what SpaceX is all about, is take science fiction and create an exciting, inspiring future for everyone,” Musk said. “We want to be able to take anyone who wants to go to the moon, anyone who wants to go to Mars… not just a few astronauts, I mean, you, literally you.” “There are always problems on Earth,” he continued. “But there also have to be things that get you excited about the future, that make you glad to wake up in the morning, because you can’t wait to see what happens next.” The offering priced Thursday afternoon—which was announced in a free-writing prospectus filed with the SEC just after 3 p.m. ET, while markets were still open—was at $135 a share for 555.6 million shares, raising the $75 billion the company targeted and valuing it at $1.77 trillion. Underwriters hold a 30-day option to purchase up to 83.3 million additional shares, which would lift the total raise to $86.25 billion. That valuation makes it the largest IPO in stock market history: the raise is nearly triple the previous record, set when Saudi Aramco https://fortune.com/company/saudi-aramco/ collected $25.6 billion on Riyadh’s exchange in December 2019 at a $1.71 trillion valuation. One caveat for the record books: in inflation-adjusted terms, Aramco raised the equivalent of $33.2 billion at a $2.21 trillion valuation—so by that measure, the Saudi oil giant’s crown isn’t fully relinquished. The offering covers only about 4% of SpaceX’s roughly 13.08 billion shares outstanding, making the company worth more today than Tesla https://fortune.com/company/tesla/ was the day it became the world’s most valuable automaker. The $1.77 trillion price tag instantly https://fortune.com/2026/06/03/spacex-ipo-share-price-index-funds-valuation-public/ makes SpaceX the sixth-most valuable company in the U.S. and seventh-most valuable worldwide, ahead of Meta https://fortune.com/company/facebook/ and Tesla—despite posting a $4.9 billion net loss in 2025 on $18.7 billion in revenue, the vast majority of it from Starlink. At the IPO price, investors are paying roughly 94 times trailing revenue for a company whose combined entity with xAI https://fortune.com/2026/02/02/elon-musk-spacex-xai-ipo-trillion/ has racked up an accumulated deficit of $41.3 billion. And unlike most newly public companies, SpaceX won’t have to wait long for index money to find it. Don’t look for it in the S&P 500 https://fortune.com/2026/06/05/sp-500-spacex-elon-musk-retirement-savings-401k/ : the benchmark requires sustained profitability, which SpaceX doesn’t have. But under a Nasdaq rule change that took effect https://fortune.com/2026/06/02/spacex-index-funds-new-listing-rules/ in May, megacap debuts can join the Nasdaq-100 https://fortune.com/2026/06/06/spacex-openai-anthropic-mega-ipo-sp500-inclusion-nasdaq-russell/ in as little as 15 trading days rather than the usual three months, and FTSE Russell and other index providers have agreed to fast-track inclusion as well—meaning trillions of dollars in passive retirement and pension money could soon hold SpaceX whether savers chose it or not. The road to Wall Street After more than a decade of fueling fanfare over the possible public offering of his company, Musk would often dangle a possible IPO just to dismiss it almost immediately afterwards. For the most part of the last 14 years, a SpaceX IPO became a running joke among investors: Musk would repeatedly promise a public offering at a later date, just for that date to arrive and for Musk to call those claims speculative at best. In 2012, he told Bloomberg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-02-09/musk-sees-good-chance-of-spacex-stock-offering-by-next-year there was “a good chance that SpaceX goes public next year.” A few years later, he said the company would only go public after the Mars Colonial Transporter, the precursor to Starship, began shuttling humans to Mars. https://fortune.com/2026/05/23/what-business-is-space-x-in-ipo-filing-stock/ In 2019, he told SpaceX employees in an email it would “make sense to take Starlink public in about three years or so,” and in 2020, he promised again an IPO, “but only several years in the future when revenue growth is smooth and predictable. Public market does not like erratic cash flow.” Musk was still playing defense in 2024, after SpaceX ran a $112-a-share insider tender that valued the company at roughly $210 billion up from $180 billion in a tender just months earlier . He pointed to the litigation over his Tesla pay package as a reason SpaceX should remain private, posting that “the legal load and pressure for short-term results for a public company are very high.” It may be that very rationale that changed his mind when reports of yet another will-he-or-won’t-he with regard to a SpaceX IPO resurfaced last year. The rise of orbital AI compute, coupled with Starship’s maturation to the point where demands for capital would dwarf whatever private markets would be able to cleanly supply, could be the reason why Musk finally chose to file an S-1 on April Fools’. https://fortune.com/2026/04/01/spacex-has-filed-confidentially-for-ipo/ The public S-1 dropped on May 20 https://fortune.com/2026/05/20/spacex-finally-files-ipo-prospectus-reveals-revenue-is-up-but-losses-are-too/ , and the subsequent road show launched on June 4, a week earlier than expected as the SEC completed its review ahead of schedule. The roadshow https://fortune.com/2026/04/07/spacex-openai-anthropic-reopen-ipo-market-crunchbase/ —where a company’s executives and underwriters pitch their stock offering to institutional investors—drew $250 billion in orders and was underwritten by a 21-bank syndicate https://fortune.com/2026/06/10/goldman-sachs-morgan-stanley-openai-anthropic-ipos/ , led by Goldman Sachs and with Morgan Stanley https://fortune.com/company/morgan-stanley/ , Bank of America https://fortune.com/company/bank-of-america-corp/ , Citigroup https://fortune.com/company/citigroup/ and JPMorgan rounding out the top five. There’s one big concern hanging over the debut: Starship, the vehicle at the center of SpaceX’s most ambitious projections, is currently grounded while the FAA conducts a mishap investigation into its most recent test flight. An unconventional man whose ideas are out of this world Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 as a means to answer what many children eventually grow out of the habit of asking: what’s out there on the red planet? Now, the IPO could make the man with extraterrestrial sights the first trillionaire in history https://fortune.com/2026/04/02/elon-musk-world-first-trillionaire-spacex-ipo/ . Using $100 million of his PayPal proceeds, Musk visited Russia three times to buy refurbished Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles ICBMs for a Mars greenhouse stunt. Upon his return, he realized rocket materials accounted for roughly 2% of a typical launch cost, and he decided to build some himself. Throughout the years, he launched several liquid-fueled rockets—some fell, and some fell flat—and would eventually call for data centers and even communes on Mars. However, the 300-plus-page IPO prospectus itself claims a total addressable market of $28.5 trillion https://fortune.com/2026/05/20/space-x-filing-elon-musk-pay-colonize-mars/ , a figure the company calls the largest in human history https://fortune.com/2026/05/20/spacex-ipo-filing-s1-total-addressable-market-make-life-multiplanetary/ , even as it acknowledges the speculative and “improbable” nature of its Mars timeline. The IPO is as unconventional as the man behind it. Usually, most companies set a price range and let the book-building process find the clearing price. In this case, SpaceX simply told investors what the stock would cost, fixing $135 a share before the roadshow even began, and making Thursday night’s pricing a formality. It also reserved roughly 30% of shares for retail investors, about three times the typical allocation for an offering of this size. As a result, it’s close to four times oversubscribed: investors placed more than $250 billion in orders, roughly three and a half to four times the shares on offer, meaning many buyers will receive a fraction of what they requested, or nothing at all. Post-offering, Musk will retain control through a multi-class share structure that, according to a letter from New York’s state and city comptrollers https://fortune.com/2026/05/22/space-x-stock-ipo-price-elon-musk-shareholders/ and the head of CalPERS, gives him as much as 85% of voting power despite https://fortune.com/2026/05/28/spacex-elon-musk-ipo-money/ owning about 42% of the equity. As the pension officials put it https://fortune.com/2026/06/04/spacex-anthropic-massive-ipo-401k-retirement-accounts/ , removing the company’s most powerful officer would, as a mathematical matter, require his own vote, making him effectively unfireable without his consent. Morningstar, the market’s most prominent bear, pegs SpaceX’s fair value at $780 billion https://fortune.com/2026/06/11/spacex-ipo-largest-history-wall-street-analysts-split-valuation-debate/ , or roughly 55% below the IPO valuation. It argued that neither a rapidly reusable Starship nor commercially competitive orbital data centers has been demonstrated, and that retail investors will likely find better entry points after listing. History is written by the victors The hype surrounding SpaceX’s debut left analysts wondering ahead of Friday whether the stock could possibly live up to it. Historically, among the largest public offerings on record, the odds of a company posting negative returns in its first three months are roughly a coin flip. Take Saudi Aramco, the previous record holder: it rose 10% on its first day in December 2019, briefly pushing its valuation to about $1.88 trillion and past Apple https://fortune.com/company/apple/ as the world’s most valuable listed company. Within months, amid the oil crash and COVID selloff, it had fallen below its offer price. You can blame oil markets for that one, but the tech-growth story powering SpaceX is the same one that plagued Facebook’s May 2012 debut. The social network fell nearly 50% in its first three months and traded below its $38 offer price for more than a year before becoming one of the best-performing mega-cap IPOs ever. Internationally, SoftBank Corp dropped 14.5% on its first day in Tokyo in December 2018 and spent years below its offer price. Other companies thrived in the months following their IPO, and even eked out a path to secure strong market domination during some of the economy’s worst years. Six months before Lehman Brothers collapsed, Visa https://fortune.com/company/visa/ raised $17.9 billion in March 2008 and thrived through the Great Recession. The largest U.S. IPO previously belonged to Alibaba, which raised $21.8 billion in 2014 and earned the company a $231 billion market cap at listing. SpaceX is the first of a hotly anticipated “IPO summer.” Anthropic filed its confidential S-1 on June 1; OpenAI followed a week later, targeting a September debut at an $852 billion valuation. If both land before year’s end, 2026 will close as the year public markets finally had to price artificial general intelligence. The Fortune 500 Innovation Forum will convene Fortune 500 executives, U.S. policy officials, top founders, and thought leaders to help define what’s next for the American economy, Nov. 16-17 in Detroit.