SpaceX targets biggest ever stock market debut, putting Musk on course to be trillionaire

IPO could raise up to $75bn, giving SpaceX market value of $1.77tn as it sets up Musk for extraordinary wealth

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is looking to raise $75bn (£55bn) from its blockbuster stock market listing next week as the rocket company aims for the largest initial public offering ever.

If the stock market launch – primed for 12 June – goes as planned, founder Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, could make history as the first trillionaire.

The rocket, satellite and artificial intelligence company, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp, said in a filing on Wednesday that it would sell 555.6m shares at $135 a piece.

That would give SpaceX, which is loss-making, a market value of $1.77tn. Only six companies in the blue chip S&P 500 stock market index are worth more, with the US semiconductor company Nvidia topping the list at $5.2tn. The previous record for an IPO is the oil company Saudi Aramco, which floated in 2019 at a price of $1.7tn and raised $25.6bn.

Musk is not selling any of his shares in the SpaceX offering and would retain 82.4% of the voting power in the company.

Forbes values Musk’s net worth at $825bn, and his stake in SpaceX at $542bn. The South African-born billionaire also leads Tesla, the electric carmaker, as well as the social media platform X. Forbes said in April a SpaceX float would “all but guarantee his net worth rising above $1tn”.

SpaceX is expected to have a hefty weighting in the S&P 500 due to its sheer size, which means most people with investment accounts or pension pots will be exposed to its stock market performance as investors in the company.

SpaceX confidentially filed to go public in April. Founded in 2002, SpaceX has been central to Musk’s ambition of building a “self-sufficient city on Mars”. Since its inception, the company has been the recipient of lucrative aerospace contracts. Nasa, for example, depends on SpaceX rockets for most of its launches.

SpaceX has also joined competitors such as Anthropic and OpenAI in the race to scale up AI technology. The company acquired Musk’s xAI in a move to build out solar-powered infrastructure that could meet the energy demands of this AI boom era.

Anthropic, known for its AI chatbot Claude, filed paperwork this week to go public. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is expected to follow suit soon. Alphabet, the owner of Google, moved to raise $80bn in equity this week to fund its vast AI infrastructure investments.

The wave of splashy IPOs and fundraising has widely been interpreted as an attempt to generate capital that will fund datacentres pow