SpaceX IPO: First-Day Price, Overallotment, and Debt

The trading day

SpaceX priced its offering at $135 a share to raise $75 billion, then opened on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX at $150. The stock briefly traded up more than 30% intraday, putting the company's market value near $2.25 trillion for a moment, before settling to close at $160.95, up 19% from the IPO price. The deal was led by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup, with roughly a dozen more banks in the syndicate. [1]

Elon Musk framed the outcome against his own early doubts: "I gave SpaceX a less than 10% chance of succeeding" when the company started, he said. COO Gwynne Shotwell pointed to the launch record instead of the stock price: "Look at our track record, look at our history. We do really difficult things." [1]

Atlas interpretation: Not every read of the day was celebratory. Morningstar's analysts valued SpaceX nearer $780 billion and called the IPO price rich, a reminder that a 19% pop and a trillion-dollar headline valuation are a market's opening bid, not a settled number, for a company that was not yet profitable on the revenue disclosed around the listing. [1]

Bigger than the day-one number

The $75 billion headline was not the final one. The offering was oversubscribed by more than four times, and the underwriters exercised their overallotment option in full, pushing the total raised to $85.7 billion by the following week. By the close of that first trading day the stock's advance had carried SpaceX's market value above $2 trillion outright, not just in an intraday spike. [3][4]

Atlas interpretation: The summary's comparison to the previous record holds up on the final number as well as the headline one. Saudi Aramco's 2019 listing, the prior largest, raised $29.4 billion; SpaceX's $85.7 billion with the overallotment included is close to triple that, not just the $75 billion figure that made the day-one headlines. [5]

What the money was for

SpaceX's stated use of proceeds was mostly about clearing debt rather than funding something new: roughly $20 billion earmarked to extinguish loans left over from its February 2026 merger with xAI and its earlier acquisition of X, with the remainder going toward AI compute capacity, launch infrastructure and Starlink. [3]

Less than two weeks after the IPO, SpaceX also sold $25 billion in bonds, drawing roughly $90 billion in orders, more than three times the amount on offer. The company said the bond proceeds were largely meant to cover a $20 billion bridge loan due in September 2027, with the rest going to general corporate purposes. [4]

Atlas interpretation: Reading the equity and debt raises together, going public did not by itself retire the legacy X and xAI debt load; SpaceX still went to the bond market for a comparably sized sum within two weeks. An $85.7 billion IPO and a $25 billion, four-times-oversubscribed bond sale in the same month say more about how much appetite existed for SpaceX paper of any kind than about which instrument specifically cleared which liability. [3][4]