SpaceX Sets Price for the World’s Largest I.P.O.

The $135 share price means Elon Musk’s rocket maker is poised to exceed the 2019 initial public offering of Saudi Aramco in both valuation and money raised.

SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket maker and artificial intelligence company, set a price for its initial public offering on Wednesday of $135, which would value it at $1.77 trillion and crown it the largest I.P.O. ever.

At that price, SpaceX would raise $74.4 billion from the offering, and its valuation would be more than 40 percent higher than the $1.25 trillion that it valued itself at in February. The current I.P.O. record is held by Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company, which was valued at $1.7 trillion and raised more than $29 billion when it went public in 2019.

Most companies that go public set a preliminary price range for their stock offering before settling on a final number in case investor demand for their shares changes. But Mr. Musk and SpaceX sidestepped that and simply declared one price for investors. SpaceX could still change that price but is not expected to do so. It is likely to begin trading on the Nasdaq next week under the ticker symbol SPCX.

At $74.4 billion raised, SpaceX’s I.P.O. would be just about “more than every U.S. I.P.O. combined in the last two years,” said Matthew Kennedy, a senior I.P.O. market strategist at Renaissance Capital.

A SpaceX spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

SpaceX’s I.P.O. is a bellwether for other expected offerings that are set to be enormous, including from OpenAI and Anthropic, the artificial intelligence companies. Anthropic confidentially filed to go public on Monday, and OpenAI is expected to file in the coming weeks. Both start-ups have valuations approaching $1 trillion. The three offerings could unleash an avalanche of wealth across Silicon Valley and Wall Street, creating new corporate titans in the process.

- Author: Ryan Mac, The New York Times

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