Institutional investors piled into SpaceX, with demand for its stock at $135 a share – valuing the company at a world record listing price of $1.77 trillion – with demand for shares exceeding supply by four times ahead of public trading on the Nasdaq later this afternoon.
Set to start live trading in New York at 09.30 – 16.30 SAST – under the ticker SPCX, SpaceX is the first of a series of blockbuster listings set to happen in the US this year, with Anthropic and OpenAI also set to raise amounts that call on investors to make large bets on forward earnings.
Sources told Bloomberg that SpaceX’s initial public offering (IPO) attracted demand for more than four times the available shares ahead of the official pricing, with Gulf wealth funds having already bought into the dream. Saudi Arabia’s PIF and Kuwait Investment Authority booked stock worth $1 billion to $5 billion each ahead of the listing.
SpaceX raised the targeted $75 billion in its initial public offering, selling 555.6 million shares at $135 each.
Meanwhile, Forbes reported that retail investors placed orders for more than $100 billion in SpaceX shares, with the world’s largest asset manager wanting $5 billion-worth of stock set aside. That order on its own is nearly as much as the entire $5.5 billion artificial intelligence chipmaker Cerebras raised in its IPO earlier this month, which was the largest of 2026 before SpaceX, says the publication.
The man of the moment
Musk is set to own 85% of the company, says Aswath Damodaran, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, based on the company’s 377-page pre-listing prospectus.
With SpaceX going public at $135 per share, Musk is well on his way to becoming the world’s first trillionaire. Pretoria-born Musk, already the world’s richest man, was worth $801 billion before the IPO pricing and is now at a massive $982.6 billion, according to Forbes’ “real-time billionaires” minisite.
James Bennett, global equity analyst at Anchor, tells ITWeb that SpaceX has a great opportunity to surprise to the upside over the next five years. “The optionality in its business is simply enormous and has Elon Musk – the greatest industrialist of our time – as its CEO,” he says.
Bulls, bears and $330 price targets
The Inner Circle Trading Group posted on X that investment bank New Street is bullish on the company’s future. In a research report ahead of the Nasdaq debut, it assigned the stock a $165 price target – representing upside of about 22% from the IPO price – implying a valuation of roughly $2.3 trillion after accounting for SpaceX’s acquisition of Cursor.
Cursor is an AI-powered code editor that functions as an intelligent software development environment. The floor has not yet opened for general trading.
In a more optimistic scenario, where the company captures the upper end of its potential market opportunity, New Street says the shares could be worth as much as $330.
However, not everyone has faith in the company’s success. “SpaceX is a growing company that is money-losing and cash-burning, that will be an Elon Musk vehicle, with all the pluses and minuses that entails,” notes Damodaran.
SpaceX’s loss came in at $4.9 billion in 2025, widening through the year to a peak of $1.9 billion in the fourth quarter to end-January, which financial services company The Motley Fool says is because of “heavy spending on rockets and AI infrastructure”.
Calling SpaceX’s financial results “somewhat disappointing,” The Motley Fool points out that revenue gained 33% in 2025 to $18.6 billion, a growth rate that was slower than the 2024 gain of 35%.
Yet New Street expects SpaceX to generate $195 billion in revenue and $65 billion in earnings before interest and tax by 2030.
Rockets, satellites and Grok
SpaceX started its existence as a rocket and satellite company before its purchase of xAI, founded in 2023 to develop advanced AI models and products including the Grok chatbot, resulted in its operations being divided into three segments: space, connectivity and AI, The Motley Fool points out.
Following its acquisition of xAI in early 2026, the Colossus supercomputer cluster now sits on SpaceX’s balance sheet, leased to Anthropic for $1.25 billion a month.
Bennett points out that SpaceX is currently the dominant player in space launches and the barriers to entry to this business are significant.
New Street values the company’s direct-to-home Starlink business at $400 billion, its direct-to-cell service at $250 billion, and its third-party launch operations at $100 billion.
It has also assigned a standalone value of $575 billion to xAI, arguing that owning the underlying infrastructure warrants at least a 60% premium to rivals OpenAI and Anthropic, and plans for orbital data centres could further enhance xAI’s value.
The Motley Fool also points out that stocks that go public with large market values historically lag the broader market over time. “Very few stocks have ever achieved such an expensive valuation, and all of them have subsequently declined sharply.
“History says the stock could lose about three-quarters of its value once it reaches its peak valuation. Of course, it’s impossible to say when that will happen.”
Next!
Next on the investment menu are AI rivals Anthropic and OpenAI: listed alphabetically, as none of the IPO dates have been confirmed by the companies themselves.
Neither Anthropic nor OpenAI have issued public filings, although recent funding rounds have made Claude-maker Anthropic the world’s most valuable AI company, worth $965 billion, according to Reuters. Reports indicate it will make its debut in October, seeking to raise more than $60 billion.
OpenAI, best known for ChatGPT, is not trailing far behind, with a valuation of around $852 billion, according to media reports, although investment research firm Zacks.com puts its worth at around $1 trillion. While the company hasn’t announced potential timing, this could be sometime in late 2026 or early 2027, based on media reports.
Bennett says Anthropic is the easiest valuation to justify on current revenues. “Anthropic and OpenAI are being valued as category leaders, whereas there is a monopolistic element to how the market views SpaceX.”
The extent to which Anthropic has been able to monetise its business model already makes it by far the most likely company to be first to reach sustainable free cash flow, Bennett adds. “On the other hand, SpaceX’s pivot to AI is likely to require a significant amount of capex for the foreseeable future.”
The fine print
Bennett adds: “Up until now, Anthropic and OpenAI’s revenue growth has seemed limitless, constrained only by access to compute rather than demand. A clear slowing in demand will be perceived negatively by the market.”
Rising costs will also be a concern for investors. “At this point, the economics of running these frontier AI models is uncertain. Competition is likely to increase materially for Anthropic and OpenAI over time, including from Google, Microsoft and even SpaceX,” Bennett notes.
“OpenAI has the greatest potential to disappoint. It has already lost material ground to Anthropic and faces growing competition from new entrants.”
At the same time, there is a material backlash to AI globally, which is putting the industry in the crosshairs of regulators everywhere, says Bennett. AI companies face increasing scrutiny over copyright, privacy, misinformation and job losses, while regulators worldwide are weighing tougher rules for the industry.
For everyday investors, Bennett cautions that these big private companies have listed so late that most of the economic value has been preserved for private shareholders. “While they could still prove to be decent investments over time, there are likely far better opportunities in the broader AI ecosystem.”
* As the companies are in the US, figures are listed in dollars. For comparison, the local currency is at R16.30, a figure that has been stable for several weeks.
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