SpaceX targets biggest ever stock market debut, putting Musk on course to be trillionaire
- +Associated Press contributed reporting
Space X is seeking to raise about $75bn through its imminent initial public offering, a company filing on Wednesday revealed, which would make it the largest IPO ever.
Space X is seeking to raise about $75bn through its imminent initial public offering, a company filing on Wednesday revealed, which would make it the largest IPO ever.
If the stock market launch – primed for next week – goes accordingly, founder Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, could be poised to make history as the first trillionaire.
The company, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp, said on Wednesday it would sell 555.6m shares at $135 a piece.
The offering would give SpaceX a market value of $1.77tn. Only six companies in the S&P 500 are currently worth more, with Nvidia topping the list at $5.2tn.
Musk also leads Tesla, the electric carmaker. He is not selling any of his shares in the SpaceX offering, and he would have 82.4% of the voting power in the company.
Forbes currently values Musk’s net worth at $825bn, and his stake in SpaceX at $542bn.
In April, Musk’s space exploration and artificial intelligence (AI) company confidentially filed to go public. 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 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 course soon.
The wave of splashy public offerings has widely been interpreted as a bid to generate capital that will fund data centers powering the AI technology.
Associated Press contributed reporting
