SpaceX officially prices shares at $135 in the largest IPO ever

For once, SpaceX is ahead of schedule: Elon Musk’s space and AI conglomerate has officially confirmed that it has raised $75 billion from the sale of its shares to its underwriters, who will start selling the company on the Nasdaq stock exchange on Friday.

SpaceX has priced its 555.6 million shares at $135 each, the company said in a press release update on its website. That officially makes SpaceX the largest IPO in history, easily eclipsing the $24.9 billion in funding that Saudi Aramco raised in its public market debut in 2019. At this price, the deal also seems aimed at making Musk the world’s first trillionaire.

The company, officially known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., will trade under the ticker symbol SPCX.

With active trading getting underway tomorrow, SpaceX’s stock price could fall or rise. But anecdotal reports suggest major institutional investors and individual buyers are lining up to buy shares in the 24-year-old tech company.

If the sale is as oversubscribed as the chatty bankers claim, they will have an option to float an additional 83.3 million shares, which would raise another $11 billion at the company’s opening price.

Hyperliquid, a crypto betting marketplace that seeks to provide synthetic exposure to SpaceX stock, currently prices shares at $167, indicating that market participants are expecting a classic IPO pop of 20% on the first day of trading.

Longer term, there are big open questions about how SpaceX will be able to justify its eye-popping valuation. The company’s stellar engineering projects, from the world’s largest reusable rocket to a new U.S. chip factory, fill out a huge to-do list.

This story develops…