SpaceX (SPCX) IPO: Live updates

SpaceX shares continued to climb in extended trading on Friday, hours after markets closed. The stock was up close to 3.5% at $166.76 as of 6:30 p.m. ET, after closing at $160.95. That lifted the market cap by about another $80 billion to $2.2 trillion.

Roughly 16 million shares changed hands in post-market trading, adding to the 500-pus million shares traded during the day.

—Ari Levy

Andrej Karpathy, a prominent AI researcher and former Tesla leader, congratulated the SpaceX team in a post on X.

“In awe of SpaceX and its story – past, present and the future,” Karpathy wrote. “You can think about it in 10+ different ways and continue re-blowing your mind in circles. Huge congrats to the team!”

Karpathy joined Anthropic in May. He previously co-founded OpenAI and served as director of AI at Tesla, where he led the computer vision team for Tesla Autopilot.

—Ashley Capoot

Robert Greifeld, former chief of the Nasdaq, said he “would definitely bet” that OpenAI and Anthropic follow SpaceX to the public market this year.

SpaceX “represents a stock that’s trading not on fundamentals,” Greifeld told CNBC, noting that the company is performing “on the aspiration of what’s possible with human spirit going forward in time.”

“In many ways, you can say that this was the most difficult sell for the market, because Anthropic and OpenAI have a more clear and present business model,” Greifeld said. “I think the window is open, SpaceX has opened it, and you’ll see other companies certainly flying through.”

—Jonathan Vanian

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani weighed in on SpaceX’s historic IPO, which minted Musk as the world’s first trillionaire.

“Reason #1,000,000,000,000 why we should tax the rich,” Mamdani wrote in a post on X, replying to an article about Musk becoming a trillionaire.

Mamdani is the latest politician to spotlight wealth inequality amid SpaceX’s stock debut. Earlier on Friday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., wrote in a post on X, “We need a wealth tax.”

—Annie Palmer

It’s a monumental day for SpaceX. But is there enough demand “to absorb multiple large capital raises,” asks Michael Tanney, CEO of investment advisory firm Pereon Wealth. 

Tanney cites data from Truist Wealth, which shows 30 IPOs, such as Alibaba, Meta and Shopify, suffering within the first year. 

“I experienced this firsthand at Goldman Sachs Private Wealth Management during Facebook’s IPO. The environment was similarly frenzied,” he added.

Still, that doesn’t take away from the exciting day.

“The SpaceX IPO reinforces three themes: AI is extraordinarily capital intensive, capital formation is shifting toward equity, and the Elon Musk premium is real,” he said.

— Ananya Chetia

JPMorgan Chase will host members of its deal team and around 250 SpaceX employees for a post-IPO celebration at the bank’s headquarters in New York City.

SpaceX Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon and other executives will attend. JPMorgan will light up the building at dusk, according to a spokesperson.

–Ashley Capoot

Keith Snyder, a senior analyst at CFRA Research, told CNBC that he remains skeptical of whether SpaceX is really worth $1.77 trillion, the IPO valuation.

“It was a hard pill to swallow even there,” Snyder said in an interview on “Closing Bell.” “The growth levels that would be required within the AI segment and with premium multiples, which simply have to be astronomical, kind of borderline comical, to get to the valuations we’re talking about.”

With the market cap picking up later in the day, Snyder said in an interview, “I’m doubling down that this is overvalued at its current price.”

In a research note published shortly after its public debut, Snyder assigned SpaceX a sell rating and a 12-month price target of $115, significantly below its IPO price of $135. The stock hit a high of $176.52.

“At the end of the day, the analyst in me can’t get to the numbers that they’re talking about,” Snyder added.

— Annie Palmer

Citadel Securities, the largest retail wholesaler, said SpaceX’s listing drew the highest IPO auction order activity ever among retail investors.

Booming activity continued in live trading. SpaceX is the most bought stock by individual investors on Friday, according to VandaTrack data, with net buying running at more than 3.5 times the level of Nvidia, which is second. Retail turnover in SPCX has already reached $453 million, representing roughly 4% of all single-stock retail turnover today.

The early buying puts SpaceX on track to surpass Coinbase’s first-day retail record from April 2021, when individual investors bought a net $92 million of COIN in its debut. SpaceX has already topped every other major IPO launch over the past six years, according to VandaTrack.

— MacKenzie Sigalos and Leslie Picker

Now that SpaceX is public, investors may start turning their attention to potential IPOs from OpenAI and Anthropic. Along with SpaceX, they’re companies with a “tremendous amount of growth that could be a very big part of the future,” Gil Luria, an analyst at D.A. Davidson told CNBC.

But there’s a difference. Musk “has a 15-year track record of being CEO of a publicly traded company,” Luria said, giving the financial community, particularly those who “have made a lot of money in Tesla,” a reason to closely follow the story.

OpenAI and Anthropic may have cutting-edge technology, but they “don’t have that track record yet,” Luria said.

“As volatile as I expect SpaceX to be, and it’s going to be volatile, OpenAI and Anthropic may be even more volatile when they come out,” Luria said.

—Jonathan Vanian

SpaceX is now the sixth most-valuable company in the U.S., officially joining the small but expanding trillion-dollar club.

But its finances suggest the rocket maker doesn’t belong. Musk’s company, after generating $18.7 billion in revenue last year, is a fraction the size of the next-smallest company by sales, Micron, which recorded over $58 billion in revenue in the past four quarters.

Also, SpaceX is very much in the red, losing $4.9 billion last year, while all of the other companies in the group are profitable. Musk’s other public company, Tesla, generated the least amount of profit in the past year, at $3.9 billion.

—Jennifer Elias

SpaceX is recording massive trading volumes within hours of its Nasdaq debut.

The rocket company has traded more than 360 million shares as of shortly after 2 p.m. ET on Friday. That’s already 10 times the total volume posted by Cerebras, the second-largest IPO this year, in its first day of trading.

SpaceX has traded more than 172 million shares on the Nasdaq alone, which is more than double the amount seen by Nokia, the second-most active stock on the exchange.

SpaceX is chasing Facebook, which saw roughly 580 million shares change hands on the social media company’s first day of trading in 2012.

— Alex Harring, John Melloy

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., responded to the SpaceX IPO by calling for a wealth tax, and stronger due diligence efforts by the SEC.

in a post on X, Warren wrote that Musk “just became the world’s first trillionaire,” while the typical American household would have to work more than 11 million years to make that level of wealth. “We need a wealth tax,” she said on the app, which is owned by SpaceX.

In a separate statement, Warren, ranking member of the Senate’s banking committee, criticized the SEC.

“Trump’s SEC greenlit an IPO with numbers analysts have called ‘nonsensical,'” she wrote. “The world will get its first trillionaire while Americans across the country are scraping together every dollar to save for retirement. Rather than changing the rules to rush SpaceX into Americans’ retirement portfolios, index providers should ensure they do their part to protect American families’ investments. And the SEC should do its job and ensure Elon Musk does not rip off investors.”

Warren had formally asked the SEC to delay the SpaceX offering. She also reached out to stock indexes, seeking information on whether SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic may have pressured them to change their rules.

—Lora Kolodny

Wall Street’s ETF machine wasted little time getting in on SpaceX.

A review of SEC filings shows at least 25 exchange-traded funds tied to the rocket and AI company had been registered by the time SpaceX shares began trading on Friday. More than half are leveraged or inverse products designed to amplify the stock’s daily moves or profit from share price declines.

The filings come from issuers including Direxion, GraniteShares and ProShares, among others, highlighting the heightened investor demand surrounding one of the most anticipated IPOs in history.

Several of the proposed funds would offer leveraged exposure to SpaceX shares. That means investors could gain twice the return when the stock rises, but also suffer twice the losses when it falls. The rush to launch SpaceX products comes as leveraged ETFs have exploded in popularity in recent years, fueled in part by investors’ appetite for high-flying technology and artificial intelligence trades. Not all filed ETFs ultimately launch.

Considering investors’ access to the stock, expedited inclusion in major indexes and the growing menu of leveraged products, “you have three very powerful legs of the stool for the ecosystem to be trading very robustly,” Simeon Hyman of ProShares told CNBC.

— Nick Wells

SpaceX’s IPO is set to mint thousands of new millionaires among the ranks of engineers and other staff who hold stock. And they’re already preparing to spend their riches.

Real estate agents in California and Texas, where SpaceX has offices, told CNBC they’ve received inquiries from SpaceX employees about buying new homes. Private jet companies Flexjet and Amalfi Jets likewise said they’ve gotten inbounds from soon-to-be SpaceX millionaires looking to celebrate the offering with a trip.

One of the most common post-IPO purchases, according to experts, is a luxury watch.

“The watch becomes a reminder of that accomplishment every time they put it on,” said Paul Altieri, founder and CEO of Bob’s Watches. “The stock certificate stays in a brokerage account. The watch goes on your wrist.”

— Hayley Cuccinello

SpaceX hawked IPO-themed merchandise on X on Friday, as the company’s stock hit the Nasdaq.

Fans of the aerospace and defense conglomerate were prompted to preorder a bell shaped like the company’s Raptor engines, which are being built to lift the company’s massive Starship rocket into orbit. 

Musk has previously sold investor-themed merchandise, namely “short shorts,” to taunt investors who were short Tesla in 2020.

—Lora Kolodny

SpaceX has the option to acquire AI code-generation startup Cursor for $60 billion this year, or can pay $10 billion to get out of the deal.

The acquisition could revitalize the cash-burning AI unit of SpaceX, making its Grok models and tools more relevant to developers, in line with competing products from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.

Morningstar analyst Nicolas Owens told CNBC in an email ahead of the IPO that he viewed the buyout as “an example of the company using ‘optionality’ in its capital deployment, which is a good thing, though these numbers are very large.”

The $60 billion sum represented a 3.4% dilution at the IPO valuation.

SpaceX has not provided its investors with details on Cursor’s customer list, momentum or revenue. Cursor’s market share declined from 41% in June 2025 to about 26% in May, according to spending data from Ramp. Anthropic now controls half of that category.

—Lora Kolodny and Jordan Novet

Robinhood reported unusually high traffic Friday during early trading of SpaceX shares, as users on X posted about issues with the trading platform.

“Robinhood saw record-breaking traffic today,” a company spokesperson told CNBC. “As a result, some customers experienced latency and intermittent issues. Essential systems have recovered and our teams are closely monitoring.”

— Tanaya Macheel

Some retail investors hoping to score a sizable allocation in SpaceX’s blockbuster IPO were left disappointed after receiving only a fraction of the shares they requested.

Marvin Jung, a 51-year-old retail investor, requested 1,000 shares through Robinhood but was allocated just 17 shares.

“I hate Robinhood some days,” Jung said.

The frustration was echoed across online investing forums, where Reddit users reported receiving allocations as small as one share despite strong interest in the offering.

Justin Sacco, founder of Sacco Financial, said he received 11 shares through Charles Schwab after requesting 75.

“I was hoping for a larger allocation through Schwab since I’ve been a long-term client and thought my allocation might perform better there compared to the usual experience of receiving a symbolic one-share allocation on other platforms,” he said.

After SpaceX began trading, Sacco purchased an additional four shares in the open market, bringing his position to 15 shares.

Mikey Moran, a 49-year-old trader, received 11 of the 20 shares he requested through Robinhood. Moran said he wanted exposure to what he described as “the Super Bowl of IPOs.”

The modest allocations highlight the intense demand from individual investors seeking a stake in Musk’s rocket and satellite company, one of the most anticipated public offerings in recent years.

— Yun Li and Sean Conlon

SpaceX staff wore green shoes on the trading floor in a nod to the IPO’s “greenshoe” option, which refers to the overallotment available for underwriters.

Musk re-shared a photo on X with the crying-laughing emoji alongside a fire emoji.

The IPO was led by Goldman Sachs. Morgan Stanley is leading the stabilization process.

SpaceX told investors it’s going after a gigantic $28.5 trillion total addressable market. The problem is that $22.7 billion of that is from enterprise applications, where SpaceX doesn’t currently have much going on.

“I think that there is tremendous potential for SpaceX in the space of enterprise applications,” said Arnal Dayaratna, an analyst at research firm IDC. “To be crystal clear, its positioning there right now is basically nonexistent.”

SpaceX’s AI segment provides AI models that developers can incorporate into their software. They lag behind alternatives from Alibaba, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Google, MiniMax, Tencent and Xiaomi, according to data from startup OpenRouter.

SpaceX might be able to carve out a bigger piece of the market through deal-making. In April it signed an agreement to acquire AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion.

“Cursor is building its own foundation model that has a specialization in development and building,” Dayaratna said. “There’s no reason why this technology cannot be generalized to the practice of building more generally — in other words, building digital solutions — whether they’re done by developers or some other knowledge worker persona.”

In the IPO prospectus, SpaceX said that, with Tesla, it’s building Macrohard, which it describes as “an agentic AI platform designed to be capable of fully emulating digital workflows and augmenting human operation of computers — from coding and product development to management and entire business processes — using sophisticated autonomous agents.”

To gain significant inroads in productivity software, and compete with Google and Microsoft, SpaceX would need a much more powerful AI model, Dayaratna said.

— Jordan Novet

SpaceX’s Class A volume has topped 207 million shares, with dollar volume just under $33 billion — more than the roughly $22 billion in QQQ dollar volume and $18 billion in SPY dollar volume so far today.

The stock’s session high is $168.75, up 25% from the $135 IPO price and 12.5% above its $150 opening trade.

At that high, SpaceX’s market cap reached about $2.21 trillion — putting it within striking distance of Amazon’s roughly $2.54 trillion valuation.

— Robert Hum

Altimeter’s Brad Gerstner, another participant in today’s IPO, is bullish on SpaceX’s potential in artificial intelligence.

“I think we can all agree Elon Musk and the team at SpaceX are as capable as anybody on the planet,” Gerstner told CNBC on the company’s ability to build up data centers.

“In a few years, they’re going to be the largest AI hyperscaler in the United States,” he added.

—CJ Haddad

Asked about the new pressures SpaceX will face now that it’s a public company, Gavin Baker, an early investor in the startup, told CNBC that he expects Wall Street to understand SpaceX’s long-term vision.

Baker likened SpaceX to Amazon, which famously communicated to investors in the years after it went public in 1994 that long-term growth was more important than short-term profits.

“I would just point you to the early days of Amazon, which was investing heavily in a business, and the stock market was very supportive of those investments, because it saw there was an ROI,” Baker said.

He said SpaceX’s internal rate of return on its Colossus 1 data center has been strong.

“When you have our IRRs like that, I think markets are generally supportive of capital investments,” he said.

— Annie Palmer

SpaceX’s $1.77 trillion IPO valuation is appropriate today, but the company is set up to grow in the coming years, Altimeter Capital CEO and investor Brad Gerstner said on CNBC on Friday.

He said he told his mom and siblings that it could be a good investment if they held SpaceX stock for years.

“It’s not going to be a get-rich-quick scheme, but if you want to own it for a year or two years, I think you’re going to do really well. Competitive returns from this one,” Gerstner said.

— Kif Leswing

Correction: SpaceX’s IPO valuation was $1.77 trillion. An earlier version misstated the figure.

Nasdaq President Nelson Griggs told CNBC that SpaceX’s opening trade came together faster and more efficiently than expected, with Morgan Stanley leading the stabilization process and the stock opening on 58 million shares at $150.

“It wasn’t Nasdaq — it was the whole community, led by Morgan Stanley stabilizing. We got to the order size they were looking to in a very efficient manner,” Griggs said. “They saw a lot of support in the book.”

Griggs said the IPO benefited from a diversified order book, including long-only investors, active traders and unusually strong retail participation. He estimated that roughly $15 billion of the raise came from retail investors, calling that allocation “larger than most IPOs” and saying Tesla’s heavily retail-owned shareholder base likely helped drive excitement around the SpaceX debut.

With the stock trading roughly 20% above its opening price shortly after the first trade, Griggs said Nasdaq was watching volatility closely, but did not see signs that trading would need to be paused under limit-up, limit-down rules.

He called demand for the offering “incredible” and said other companies preparing to go public would likely study the SpaceX listing as a blueprint for how the market can digest a mega-cap IPO.

— MacKenzie Sigalos

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon congratulated SpaceX in a post on X on Friday, writing that he is proud of the “strong partnership” the two companies have built. Goldman served as the lead left bookrunner on the transaction.

“I’ve known Elon for more than 15 years, as have several of my colleagues, and it’s been incredible to see his vision come to life and to work with Gwynne, Bret, and the entire team,” Solomon wrote.

“We are excited as SpaceX enters this new chapter of its journey as a public company, and we look forward to supporting their mission of advancing the frontier of human space exploration,” he said.

—Ashley Capoot

Tesla shed about 2% on Friday, as investors’ attention shifted to the SpaceX market debut.

Elon Musk’s aerospace and defense conglomerate has surpassed a $2 trillion valuation, and is now worth more than his automaker Tesla, which had a market capitalization of about $1.2 trillion as of early Friday.

In an amended IPO filing, SpaceX said it may issue “significant equity” to fund future transactions. That sparked fresh speculation around a merger between SpaceX and Tesla.

Tesla had invested $2 billion in xAI before it was acquired by SpaceX, with those shares making it a stakeholder in SpaceX.

 —Lora Kolodny

Alphabet may be one of the biggest hidden winners in the SpaceX IPO. The company owns roughly 4.9% of SpaceX, a stake now worth about $105 billion — making it one of Google’s most lucrative private market bets ever.

But cashing out is not as simple as selling into the first trade. Alphabet still faces lockups, liquidity limits and a potential tax hit on any outright sale.

— MacKenzie Sigalos

SpaceX opened Friday at $150 per share, officially marking an approximately 11% gain over its $135 IPO price.

But that price is lower than where indications of interest showed the rocket startup could begin trading. The price was initially indicated to trading desks at $175, a price that’s more than 16% higher than where the stock ended up opening.

— Alex Harring

SpaceX’s indications of interest to trading desks now shows the first trade will come in around $150 per share. That’s down significantly from levels seen earlier in the day and the $175 price displayed initially.

The latest indications suggest that SpaceX will open with a roughly 11% increase from its IPO price of $135.

— Alex Harring

Nasdaq President Nelson Griggs told CNBC that opening a record-breaking IPO is less about ringing the bell than finding the right first trade — especially for a company the size of SpaceX.

Speaking from Nasdaq on listing day, Griggs said that for a deal of this scale, the stabilization agent typically wants to find orders for about 10% of the shares sold in the offering before setting the opening price. In SpaceX’s case, he said that would mean roughly 55 million shares.

After earlier indications around $175, SpaceX’s expected opening trade moved closer to $160, underscoring the price-discovery process Griggs described.

The listing also comes with a near-term index implication. Griggs said SpaceX would be eligible to enter the Nasdaq 100 within about 15 days, reflecting its expected place among the world’s largest nonfinancial companies by market cap.

— MacKenzie Sigalos

SpaceX board member Antonio Gracias told CNBC that he thinks SpaceX is “one of the most consequential companies in human history.”

Gracias, who is also the founder and managing partner of Valor Equity Partners, said he plans to hold his stake in SpaceX “as long as I possibly can.” Most of the firm’s 7% stake is owned by its clients.

He said he wasn’t sure about whether there could be a merger between SpaceX and Musk’s automaker Tesla, noting that decision is “way above my pay grade.”

—Ashley Capoot

The so-called Dean of Valuation has qualms about SpaceX’s market value of approximately $1.8 trillion.

“SpaceX is an amazing company. It’s an engineering marvel,” Aswath Damodaran, a New York University finance professor, told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Friday. But, “even if you build the biggest possible stories, getting to 1.8 trillion takes a lot of work.”

Assigning a valuation of $1.3 trillion already “takes the bull’s case and carries it to its limits,” he said.

“This is not a small story. It’s one of the biggest stories I’ve ever told,” Damodaran said. “I just don’t know how much give there is in the story to get past 1.3 trillion.”

Damodaran said seeing SpaceX’s addressable market of $28.5 trillion made him think the prospectus was written by Grok, the Elon Musk-owned artificial intelligence assistant, rather than a banker.

“This is a hallucination,” Damodaran said. “I would be embarrassed to even put that number out.”

— Alex Harring

SpaceX’s indications of interest to trading desks are now showing the first trade would be around $162 a share, down from the $175 level first shown initially.

The indications signal SpaceX would still open with a 20% gain from its $135 IPO price.

—John Melloy

Shaun Maguire, partner at Sequoia Capital, compared SpaceX today to another major AI beneficiary: Nvidia.

“I personally think SpaceX right now is more like Nvidia three years ago than Tesla, which I think a lot of investors comp it to,” Maguire said. “And what I mean by that is I personally have very high confidence in explosive revenue growth.”

Maguire added that as an individual investor, he is “going to hold my shares forever.”

− CJ Haddad

Correction: Shaun Maguire is a venture capitalist and partner at Sequoia Capital. An earlier version misspelled his name.

Shotwell told CNBC that SpaceX is committed to serving the government and seeing out those contracts in addition to its commercial ones.

“We’re a company of patriots, and we want to make sure that our government has access to the leading technology and the best stuff, and I think we provide the best stuff,” she said.

She added that SpaceX is “always going to support our government.”

– Laya Neelakandan

SpaceX’s first trade may be slightly lower than first indicated as Wall Street trading desks scramble to meet supply and demand of orders and open the biggest IPO ever. Although it is still expected to open with a big double-digit gain.

The latest so-called indications of interest were last at $165 a share, down from the $175 level first shown initially. That still means SpaceX would open with a 22% pop from its $135 IPO price.

The indications are sent in before the offering opens and are used by trading desks to set the first trade. This process is likely to take several more hours because of the sheer size of the SpaceX IPO and the sizable participation of retail traders in this offering.

—John Melloy

SpaceX has drawn massive enthusiasm from retail investors looking to get in on the mega-IPO, and Shotwell said that focus reflects Musk’s vision for the company.

“He’s trying to make space open for everybody,” she said. “He wanted this IPO, he wanted regular people to be able to buy the stock, and a lot of folks participated at the retail level.”

Shotwell said she hopes SpaceX sets an example for companies to allow more people to buy stock in the future.

“I’m not saying I don’t love our institutional investors,” she said. “They’ve been incredibly supportive, and they continue to be, but we’ve had so much demand over the last few years from friends and from family and from Tesla shareholders.”

— Samantha Subin

Shotwell said SpaceX isn’t deterred by Iran’s threats to target Elon Musk’s companies in the Middle East. SpaceX has faced threats “at all levels,” she said.

“I think when you’re doing things that are really different and you’re doing things that are trying to change the world, I think some people and some countries get mad, you know, but we always try to do the right thing,” Shotwell said. “We’ll keep forging ahead.”

Iranian state media reported Thursday that the country is targeting “all interests related to economic holdings managed by Elon Musk in West Asia,” including a regional Starlink ground station.

— Annie Palmer

Shotwell told CNBC she thinks Musk is “very misunderstood.” She said investors were impressed with him during discussions ahead of the IPO.

“The investors left saying, ‘I had no idea that that is the man,’ and I said, ‘That’s the man I’ve worked for for 24 years. I love him,'” Shotwell said.

—Ashley Capoot

One eye-popping figure in SpaceX’s IPO filing is the company’s claim that its total addressable market is $28.5 trillion, which is mostly tied to AI enterprise applications. That’s a place where SpaceX doesn’t currently do much.

Shotwell said the number reflects all the “digital humans” and “humanoid robots” and “cars on the planet being full self-driving.” She said they all need AI and communications and will all need to “phone home.”

“They’ll be using Starlink for that,” Shotwell said.

—Ari Levy

Shotwell said she isn’t seeing any current business risks that are sounding the alarm.

“I don’t think there’s anything sitting in front of us that I’m super worried about,” she said. “I don’t see any technology or any endeavor that we’re looking at doing that I’m afraid we can’t do.”

— Samantha Subin

Gwynne Shotwell, president and COO of SpaceX, said that the company is “100%” an emerging competitor in the artificial intelligence neocloud space.

“We are builders, we build our own launch vehicles, we build our launch sites, and we’re building data centers both on the ground as well as in orbit soon,” Shotwell told CNBC in an interview. “So, I look at ourselves as an infrastructure company.”

− CJ Haddad

Shotwell told CNBC she expects SpaceX will launch its AI1 satellites late next year, but that the company will be putting compute on some of the Starlink broadband and the Starlink mobile satellites prior to that.

“Want to make sure we understand the operation,” Shotwell said. “We love doing kind of canary sets and canary work before we fly the real thing.”

—Ashley Capoot

Asked what are the key metrics for SpaceX investors, Shotwell said they should keep an eye on the company’s progress developing Starship, its massive, fully reusable rocket.

She also called out growth of consumer and enterprise Starlink customers, Starlink Mobile, and Grok, the chatbot run by its AI unit xAI.

“There’s actually a lot going on,” Shotwell said.

— Annie Palmer

In response to the question of whether SpaceX should’ve upsized the offering, Shotwell told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan that “not everything has to get done on the first day.”

“We’re really looking for investors that want to stick with us for the long term, and I feel really proud about what we’ve done,” she said

— Samantha Subin

VandaTrack says that while aggregate retail activity is still on track for its softest week of net buying since March 2020, SpaceX’s IPO could change things.

“One explanation for the weak retail activity in recent sessions is that investors have been raising liquidity ahead of the SpaceX IPO. Activity on venues like Hyperliquid — which allows speculative investors to trade SpaceX-tied derivatives — has exploded in recent days,” the market data provider wrote in a note. “This is consistent with speculative retail interest in SpaceX building ahead of the IPO.”

VandaTrack added that the liquidation of AI winners in recent sessions could be a retail funding source for SpaceX, noting that all signs point to retail investors rebalancing into the stock rather than deploying fresh capital. Space-linked proxy trades also could face rotation risk, as investors move out of space-linked names such as Rocket Lab and Redwire that have seen strong participation from retail buyers in recent months.

“The risk is that some of these positions were simply placeholders ahead of today’s IPO,” the firm wrote. “If investors decide SpaceX is the cleanest way to express the theme, some of these proxy trades could become a source of funding throughout today’s session.”

— Lisa Kailai Han

The investment firms of billionaires including ex-eBay President Jeff Skoll and AutoZone’s Pitt Hyde are set to reap rewards from SpaceX’s IPO. Gary Lauder, a cosmetics heir turned venture capitalist, backed SpaceX through his namesake family office.

Family offices who invest in space-related startups told CNBC that they view them as infrastructure and defense plays rather than flashy bets on space exploration.

Lauder said he was attracted to the strength of its Starlink satellite technology, not the prospect of space tourism. Much of his early investing was in telecommunications.

“I never dreamed of being an astronaut,” he said. “It’s just an important mode of communication.”

Robin Lauber’s Infinitas Capital invested in SpaceX in early 2025 through a secondary offering. He cited Musk’s track record and the success of Starlink as reasons to put money in. Lauber also said he thought the valuation then was “reasonable” compared with the more than $1.75 trillion expected now.

— Hayley Cuccinello

The first so-called indications of interest are coming through on SpaceX shares on Wall Street trading desks.

They indicate SpaceX would open around $175 a share, representing about a 30% pop from the IPO price of $135 a share.

The indications are sent in before an initial offering opens and are used by trading desks to set the first trade based on supply and demand for the stock.

CNBC’s Leslie Picker, reporting from Morgan Stanley’s desk, noted this is a long process and there are still likely several hours to go before the stock opens.

“That’s a fast ball right down the middle perfect,” said CNBC’s Jim Cramer on “Squawk on the Street” of the indication. “People will say it’s done fairly and those who had the foresight to put in for stock did well.”

—John Melloy

The rally in SpaceX-tied perpetual futures on Hyperliquid slipped, with the SPCX-USDC contract trading near around $172, down from roughly 8.5% from around $176 earlier in the day. That’s still about 27% above the IPO price of $135 per share.

Trading activity on perps increased from earlier, with $322.5 million in 24-hour volume and open interest climbed to over $293 million.

— Tanaya Macheel

A growing crowd formed around the Nasdaq in New York City as the buzz builds for the SpaceX debut. Audible cheers were heard as Shotwell rang the opening bell from the Nasdaq.

Space stocks were under pressure, giving back gains seen in the premarket, as traders braced for the SpaceX IPO. Rocket Lab traded more than 5% lower, while Redwire shed 7%. Virgin Galactic dropped 24%.

SpaceX launched its flagship Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, hours before the company’s stock is set to debut on the Nasdaq.

The mission will send 29 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit.

— Samantha Subin

“Whoever you are watching this, SpaceX wants to be able to take you to the moon, take you to Mars and ultimately beyond,” Musk said during his address to employees on Friday.

—Ashley Capoot

A collection of tech accountability groups are urging investors to remember that there’s more to SpaceX than reusable rockets.

Because Elon Musk’s company also houses his xAI firm and its Grok AI chatbot, it’s now involved in multiple lawsuits and regulatory probes related to the creation of sexualized, nonconsensual imagery, sometimes referred to as deepfake porn, as CNBC previously reported.

Groups including the Heat Initiative, the Consumer Federation of America and others held an online news conference on Thursday in which they attempted to tie together how the various sexualized deepfake lawsuits and probes fit within the larger SpaceX empire. Members of the organizations explained that the numerous legal and regulatory actions are not fading away once SpaceX goes public, but are likely to escalate and become bigger risks to investors, pension fund holders and other members of the financial community.

Tyler Whitmer, the CEO of the nonprofit Executives at Legal Advocates for Safe Science and Technology, or LASST, described how recent high-profile departures at xAI could potentially impact the company’s response to addressing more issues.

“It’s not just a matter of whether xAI is willing to do the work on safety, there’s also just a capacity question,” Whitmer said.

And despite these legal issues centering on xAI, Whitmer noted that they ultimately impact the wider SpaceX.

“Is the organization within SpaceX capable of doing the work on safety that they should be doing to protect not just the world but also investors?” Whitmer said. “Problems with safety are problems for shareholder value as well.”

—Jonathan Vanian

“I gave SpaceX less than a 10% chance of succeeding at all,” Elon Musk told employees at the company’s Starbase headquarters ahead of the opening bell.

—CJ Haddad

The banks underwriting SpaceX’s IPO are taking home a total of $500 million in fees.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley will bring in roughly $100 million apiece, followed by other lead underwriters Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, who each landed about $75 million.

The hauls for the five banks’ fees represent roughly 85% of the total fee pool.

— Leslie Picker and CJ Haddad

Amid growing speculation of a SpaceX-Tesla merger, Shotwell told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan that combining both companies “might make Elon’s life a little easier.”

Shotwell acknowledged that both companies align, but said she’s focused on building rockets, improving broadband access, and getting to the International Space Station.

“There’s no question that there are synergies between Tesla and SpaceX in our futures,” she said. “There’s a convergence of what we’re all trying to accomplish in the future, but right now I’m focused on keeping the lights on here.”

Tesla and SpaceX already pool resources, including engineers, and Musk has discussed merging the companies, CNBC previously reported. Musk sits on both companies’ boards and holds over 80% of the voting power at SpaceX.

—Samantha Subin

Ben Narasin, the founder of Tenacity Venture Capital, told CNBC that if SpaceX “doesn’t fly,” it could put a “true chill” in the market and could be a “huge stall for everything else.”

“If it pops, everybody is just popping champagne and running to push their stuff out,” Narasin said. “We’ll see a tremendous amount of IPOs, not just OpenAI and Anthropic, but a lot of other great companies.”

—Ashley Capoot

Alphabet invested $900 million in SpaceX more than a decade ago, added to its position over time and now owns roughly 4.9% of the $1.77 trillion company.

That would make SpaceX Alphabet’s most lucrative private market bet. The Google parent also has exposure to Cursor, the AI coding startup SpaceX has agreed to acquire. If that deal closes, Alphabet’s Cursor stake could potentially convert into additional SpaceX-linked upside.

But monetizing the SpaceX stake is not simple. Alphabet would be subject to a post-IPO lockup period, liquidity limits and a potential tax hit on an outright sale. One tax expert told CNBC the company could explore more tax-efficient structures, including exchangeable debt or a split-off, but none are as clean as simply selling shares and using the proceeds.

There are also strategic reasons for Alphabet to stay close to SpaceX, especially as Google looks for more ways to secure AI compute capacity.

The SpaceX position comes as Alphabet ramps up spending on AI infrastructure. Melius Research has modeled Alphabet’s free cash flow flipping negative next year as the company funds the build-out. That makes the SpaceX stake a powerful balance sheet asset — but not necessarily an easy source of cash.

—MacKenzie Sigalos

Famed journalist and Elon Musk biographer Walter Isaacson says SpaceX’s IPO will usher in a new wave of innovation for the space industry.

“It’s not just that you’re getting a new trillionaire, but you’re getting a whole new economy here, which is a space economy,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Friday.

This new economy includes Starlink satellites, future data centers in outer space, and could also expand to mineral mining, Isaacson said.

—Samantha Subin

Andreessen Horowitz’s David George said SpaceX has “demonstrated things that no one else can do.”

“This is the best entrepreneur of our generation in Elon, and he’s going after two of the biggest markets of all time, and two of the most important markets in technology for our society — so space and AI,” George told CNBC.

“They can send a Starship, which is the size of a football field, effectively up to space, land it back on Earth with the chopsticks − no one else is close to being able to do that.”

—CJ Haddad

The Nasdaq opening window is set for 9:50 a.m. ET. That’s when indications for SpaceX’s opening price should start to appear.

—Ashley Capoot

Two of SpaceX’s major competitors in AI — OpenAI and Anthropic — are also gearing up for IPOs.

OpenAI, which is valued at $852 billion by private investors, confidentially filed its prospectus with the SEC on Monday. The company said it has not decided on timing, and that it’s weighing a “complicated set of tradeoffs.”

Anthropic announced it confidentially filed its prospectus with regulators earlier this month. The company said the IPO will “depend on market conditions and other factors.” Anthropic closed a funding round at a $965 billion valuation in May.

—Ashley Capoot

Maye Musk is the first family member pictured arriving at the Nasdaq for the debut of SpaceX.

The family has close ties to Elon’s companies, with his brother Kimbal on the Tesla board.

—Chris Eudaily

Options volumes are booming in stocks with ties to SpaceX ahead of Friday’s historic debut.

Shares of EchoStar, which owns an estimated 3% of SpaceX stock, surged 11% Thursday and options volume was more than eleven times the 30-day average in ‘SATS’, according to data from Cboe’s LiveVol. AST Spacemobile jumped 12% Thursday alongside almost $140 million in options trading. 

EchoStar shares were higher by another 5% in early trading Friday. AST SpaceMobile was also trading higher in the premarket.

Read more here.

—Oliver Renick, John Melloy

Crypto traders in SpaceX-linked perpetual futures continue to price in a strong public-market debut for Elon Musk’s space company.

The SPCX-USDC perpetual contract was trading around $176 on Hyperliquid on Friday, about 30% higher than the IPO price of $135 per share, though still down sharply from the peak levels exceeding $220 in May.

More than $233 million worth of the perp changed hands over the past 24 hours, while open interest climbed above $263 million, indicating sustained speculative demand.

The contracts, which do not expire and are primarily traded by leverage-seeking crypto investors, are one of the market’s most active proxies for pre-IPO sentiment toward SpaceX.

— Tanaya Macheel

Traders on prediction market platform Polymarket think that SpaceX will close above a $2 trillion market cap after its IPO on Friday.

They place 70% odds for the stock to do so on its debut on the public markets. They also think there are near 50-50 odds it will close above $2.2 trillion in market cap. And they think it’s extremely likely the stock will rise today, with an 84% chance it closes above a $1.8 trillion valuation.

SpaceX at its IPO is valued at around $1.77 trillion.

Five other U.S. companies have reached the $2 trillion market cap benchmark: Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon.

—Davis Giangiulio

Protesters gathered in New York City’s Times Square one day ahead of SpaceX’s public debut, aiming to draw attention to Elon Musk’s track record where AI safety is concerned.

Musk’s Grok AI tools and social network X have come under fire for enabling users to easily create and distribute sexualized and violent images of real people, including children, based on their photos and without their consent.

Multiple international jurisdictions have launched formal investigations of xAI, now known as SpaceXAI, and the company was also sued over Grok in the U.S., including by the city of Baltimore, and by a group of women and girls who had been directly impacted.

In its IPO filings, SpaceX said it had “recorded an accrual of $530 million for litigation losses that are probable and reasonably estimable” resulting from these cases as of the end of 2025.

One group that described itself as a coalition of concerned citizens and industry and faith leaders, Safe AI Now, set up a 40-foot inflatable figure in Times Square depicting a pale, shirtless Musk with the words “SpaceX’s Grok Makes AI Child Porn” scrawled across his chest.

In an emailed statement to CNBC, the coalition said:

“The effigy of Musk bears a simple warning to investors: Musk built a dangerous and exploitative AI, covered up the damage, merged it with SpaceX, and is now selling the liability to the public at $135 a share.”

They added that “A company that enables child porn is inherently unstable and puts American investors and retirement funds at risk. SpaceX shareholders are on the hook for every Grok lawsuit, criminal investigation, and regulatory fine that is coming. All while Musk becomes a ‘paper trillionaire’ and his investors pick up the tab.”

—Lora Kolodny

Retail investors have dumped artificial intelligence plays ahead of SpaceX’s IPO, according to VandaTrack.

The market data provider said individual traders have pulled back on AI-related names such as Micron, Advanced Micro Devices and Marvell Technology. Vanda said small traders may be shoring up money to play SpaceX’s market debut, in addition to the expected IPOs of OpenAI and Anthropic in the future.

“We’re already seeing signs that retail investors are rotating out of recent AI [favorites] ahead of the IPO wave,” Vanda told clients in a note this week.

—Alex Harring

After its market debut, founder and CEO Elon Musk will have voting control of 82.4% in SpaceX, according to the company’s IPO filings. He will need to hold onto all of his SpaceX shares for a year, however.

“We believe that Mr. Musk’s substantial ownership interest in us provides him with an economic incentive to assist us to be successful,” SpaceX said in the risk factors section of its prospectus.

After a 366-day lock-up period, “Mr. Musk will not be subject to any obligation to maintain his ownership interest in us and may elect at any time thereafter to sell all or a substantial portion of or otherwise reduce his ownership interest in us,” the filing said.

SpaceX is officially a “controlled company” with no independent board majority. About 911 million insider shares, or about twice the public float, will unlock two days after the company’s first planned earnings report.

—Lora Kolodny

According to IPO filings, the company has racked up a deficit of around $41.3 billion since it was founded in 2002.

It has already spent more than $15 billion to develop its massive, Starship rocket, which it intends to be fully reusable in the future. Starship is also meant to bring NASA astronauts back to the surface of the moon, and eventually to Mars.

SpaceX said in its prospectus that its connectivity unit, primarily comprised of Starlink, generated $11.39 billion in 2025, accounting for 61% of total sales. In the first quarter of this year, it climbed to 69% of total sales.

The company cautioned investors in its prospectus about its history of net losses, and that it may not achieve profitability in the future. It lost $4.9 billion last year, and $4.28 billion in the first quarter of 2026, alone with both capital and operating expenses expected to increase as it spends heavily on Starship and AI initiatives.

—Lora Kolodny

On a livestream before the SpaceX IPO, Musk said he wanted to take the company public in part to raise money for the “massive capital endeavor” of building and running artificial intelligence data centers in space.

So-called orbital data centers “will be the primary means by which AI can be expanded,” Musk said. And putting data centers into orbit may help companies avoid the community backlash against data centers and the sometimes polluting power plants installed to run them on Earth.

“There are very few people who want a power plant in their backyard, so if we wanted to say double the electricity usage of the United States, which is on average about 500 gigawatts, we would have twice as many power plants,” he said.

In space, he mused, companies can “go far beyond the electricity generation of Earth,” by running their equipment on solar power around the clock.

However, space-based data centers are unproven so far, and have a panoply of associated risks.

Electronics required for AI training and inference are heavy to lift, power-hungry and require thermal regulation. Yet, cooling them can’t be done as easily in the vacuum of space.

Putting satellites packed with computing equipment in space could become less impractical with the adoption of chips that feature superconducting logic, rather than traditional semiconductors, said Peter Barrett, a general partner at venture firm Playground Global.

“Doing it the way they’re currently planning on doing it is madness, but it won’t be a problem, because it’s never going to happen,” he said.

SpaceX is not the only company working on orbital data centers, of course. Alphabet’s Project Suncatcher shares the same ambition. However, SpaceX’s timeline is aggressive.

The company aims to deploy its first satellites that can provide computing power for AI models as soon as 2028, according to its IPO prospectus.

—Jordan Novet and Lora Kolodny

Shotwell said orbital flights for Starship “largely depends” on the Federal Aviation Administration, but the company should fly every month and we could see Starship in orbit by the end of this year.

“We have done an in-space Raptor lighting, so we feel pretty comfortable, but we want another suborbital shot on the next flight,” she said.

—Chris Eudaily

Jennifer Nason, former global chair, investment banking at JPMorgan, told CNBC’s “Morning Call” that the SpaceX IPO is “a bit of an unveiling” for Gwynne Shotwell.

“Elon can take a lot of the oxygen out of the room, but she’s been there from the beginning,” Nason said.

—Chris Eudaily

SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan that she “wasn’t sure we would go public.”

“Today, across SpaceX’s various businesses, the building blocks of a publicly traded company are now in place,” she said in an exclusive interview.

Shotwell is the company’s top executive underneath Musk.

“I do not want to focus on quarterly earnings,” she told Brennan. “I’m not saying we’re not going to do right by our investors, but what folks who invest in SpaceX need to know is that what we’re doing is very futuristic.”

—Chris Eudaily

SpaceX is offering 555,555,555 shares of Class A common stock in the IPO. At the $135 per share set price, the offering raised $75 billion.

There is an overallotment of 83,333,333 Class A shares available to underwriters for up to 30 days after the June 3 S-1A.

Without the overallotment, there are 13,075,865,175 Class A and B shares available immediately, which puts the SpaceX market cap at $1.77 trillion.

Should the overallotment be exercised, those would add to the total Class A and B shares and increase the market cap accordingly.

—Chris Eudaily

SpaceX has been a hot topic on Reddit’s WallStreetBets, the discussion forum that became synonymous with the meme stock craze.

The rocket startup has been mentioned more than 1,600 times on the platform since Monday, according to data shared with CNBC by meme stock tracker Breakout Point. Those numbers have made it one of the most-discussed companies on WallStreetBets in the days leading up to the IPO, Breakout Point’s data shows.

—Alex Harring

According to IPO filings, the company has racked up a deficit of around $41.3 billion since it was founded in 2002.

It has already spent more than $15 billion to develop its massive, Starship rocket, which it intends to be fully reusable in the future. Starship is also meant to bring NASA astronauts back to the surface of the moon, and eventually to Mars.

SpaceX said in its prospectus that its connectivity unit, primarily comprised of Starlink, generated $11.39 billion in 2025, accounting for 61% of total sales. In the first quarter of this year, it climbed to 69% of total sales.

The company cautioned investors in its prospectus about its history of net losses, and that it may not achieve profitability in the future. It lost $4.9 billion last year, and $4.28 billion in the first quarter of 2026, alone with both capital and operating expenses expected to increase as it spends heavily on Starship and AI initiatives.

—Lora Kolodny

The capital raised in the IPO is expected to fund the further development of SpaceX’s massive Starship rockets, which are currently in a test flight phase and are not yet fully reusable.

The company will also use the funding for future artificial intelligence products and infrastructure, including a chip factory known as Terafab that SpaceX will build with Tesla and Intel in Texas.

—Lora Kolodny