SpaceX lists on Nasdaq in record IPO, lifting Musk's net worth past $1 trillion

Starlink as the cash engine

The largest part of SpaceX's current revenue still comes from Starlink, its satellite-internet service. Starlink generated $3.26 billion in revenue in the first quarter of the current year and now serves around 10.3 million customers across 164 countries. A future iteration of the service, intended to deliver internet from space directly to smartphones, is to be launched by the next-generation Starship rocket, which SpaceX says should begin commercial flights in the second half of the year once testing is complete.

Despite the blockbuster valuation, SpaceX's recent financial performance has been heavily loss-making. In the first quarter of 2026 the company recorded a loss of $4.28 billion on revenue of approximately $4.7 billion. For the full previous year it posted losses of around $4.94 billion on revenue of $18.67 billion (roughly €16 billion) — a result the German report summed up as "tiefrote Zahlen" (deeply negative figures).

Heavy losses, AI ambitions

Elon Musk is asking investors to bet on future successes, given those current losses. As one dispatch put it, "verlangt Musk den Anlegern eine Wette auf künftige Erfolge ab." According to the company itself, artificial intelligence is expected to give the business a major boost over time, a view the German report summarized as: "soll der Firma zufolge mit der Zeit Künstliche Intelligenz einen großen Schub bringen."

One pillar of that AI strategy is the idea of space-based data centers powered by solar energy. The concept is that the Sun delivers vastly more energy in orbit than on the ground, which could one day make orbital compute attractive. Skeptics counter with practical objections — substantial build costs, the difficulty of cooling hardware even in the cold of space, and the risk that radiation can damage circuitry. SpaceX has so far invested more than $15 billion in the Starship program, the launch system that would underpin such an effort.

Musk's control and paper trillion

The IPO's biggest winner alongside Musk himself is Musk himself: he retains a clear majority of SpaceX shares and will hold more than 80% of voting rights after the listing, thanks to supervoting stock. As the German report noted, "Musk wird mit einem Stimmrechtsanteil von mehr als 80 Prozent auch nach dem Börsengang die volle Kontrolle über SpaceX behalten." The same report described him as "der erste Mensch mit einem Vermögen von mehr als einer Billion Dollar – zumindest auf dem Papier, gemessen am Wert seiner SpaceX-Aktien und Anteile am ebenfalls von ihm geführten Elektroautobauer Tesla" — the first person with a net worth above one trillion dollars, at least on paper, based on his SpaceX shares and his stake in the electric-car maker Tesla, which he also runs.

Long-time Musk associate Peter Thiel, through his venture firm Founders Fund, holds around 3% of SpaceX, a stake acquired for roughly $600 million and now worth more than $50 billion at the IPO issue price, according to Bloomberg. Venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, which invested around $2 billion, now holds a stake worth more than $20 billion. Those paper gains illustrate how dramatically the price tag on SpaceX has moved since those private rounds.

Big winners: Thiel and Sequoia

Shares were scheduled to begin trading on the Nasdaq from 15:30 MESZ on Friday, with the German dispatch reporting: "Heute, Freitag, findet der größte Börsengang in der Geschichte der Kapitalmärkte statt: Aktien des US-amerikanischen Raumfahrt- und KI-Unternehmens SpaceX von Elon Musk werden erstmals an der Technologiebörse Nasdaq gehandelt." The Vienna and New York dateline underscores that European outlets are treating the listing as a global-market event, not just a US tech story.

The valuation figures reported in the German press cycle varied slightly across dispatches: $1.8 trillion in one account, $1.75 trillion in another, and $1.77 trillion in a third that compared the company directly to Meta. The dpa-AFX report, citing the actual trading debut, settled on the $1.77 trillion figure. The variations reflect different snapshots taken at different stages of pricing and order-book updates, and are within the range typically seen for a deal of this size.

What the market is really betting on

The wider context is a market environment in which AI-linked business models have become the dominant story on Wall Street. The German financial press framed this as: "KI-Fantasie treibt amerikanische und europäische Unternehmen an die Wall Street," — AI fantasy is driving American and European companies to Wall Street. SpaceX is positioning itself to be read as an AI company as much as an aerospace one, with the planned orbital data centers and continued Starlink expansion as the main growth narratives.

Beyond the numbers, the IPO is a structural moment for private space and AI. SpaceX had, until Friday, been one of the largest privately held companies in the world. Its public debut opens a window for retail and institutional investors who have watched the company's value climb through successive private rounds, often without the ability to participate. The fact that Musk retained more than 80% of voting power means the day-to-day direction of the company will not change, even as outside shareholders take on financial exposure to its losses and to its AI and Starship ambitions.

The next test for the stock will be how the market digests the gap between the IPO valuation and the company's current earnings. With first-quarter revenue of around $4.7 billion against a loss of $4.28 billion, and full-year revenue of $18.67 billion against losses of $4.94 billion, the bull case rests almost entirely on the future commercial performance of Starship, the long-term economics of orbital data centers, and the continued growth of Starlink, which already serves 10.3 million customers in 164 countries and which SpaceX aims to extend to direct-to-smartphone connectivity.