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SpaceX (Nasdaq: SPCX) closed its first day of trading near $171 on Friday, a 27% gain over the $135 IPO price, on more than $33 billion in dollar volume — exceeding the combined daily turnover of QQQ and SPY. At the session intraday high of $168.75, the company’s market cap briefly cleared $2.2 trillion, making it the sixth-largest company in the United States within hours of listing.

The Numbers

• IPO price: $135 (June 3 fixed offering)
• Opening trade: $150 (+11.1%)
• Session high: $168.75 (+25%)
• Day-one close: ~$171 (+27%)
• Day-one dollar volume: >$33 billion
• Implied market cap at close: ~$2.24 trillion

The opening price came in below earlier indications. Trading desks had signalled a first print around $175 before settling at $150 — a $25 gap that reflects the price-discovery friction of the largest IPO ever sold. Demand of $250 billion against a $75 billion raise meant the final allocation was heavily oversubscribed across both institutional and retail books.

Musk Crosses $1 Trillion

At the $150 opening price, Musk’s SpaceX stake was valued at approximately $766 billion. Combined with his Tesla position of roughly $280 billion, his combined net worth crossed $1 trillion at the open. At the intraday high, total net worth reached an estimated $1.18 trillion. His private xAI stake — retained separately from the SpaceX-xAI merger — was not included in that calculation.

No human being had previously held net worth above $1 trillion at any valuation. Forbes had estimated Musk at $982.6 billion pre-open.

The AI Segment Behind the Headline

The IPO structure consolidates xAI into SpaceX’s AI segment following the February 2026 all-stock merger. As disclosed in the S-1/A updated June 1:

• AI segment 2025 revenue: $3.2 billion (Grok enterprise, X data licensing, compute contracts)
• AI segment 2025 operating loss: $6.4 billion
• AI segment accumulated losses through IPO: $41.3 billion
• AI segment Q1 2026 capex: $7.7 billion — 76% of all SpaceX capex in the quarter

Starlink, which ran at approximately 63% operating margins in 2025, is the earnings engine absorbing the AI segment’s burn. The AI pitch to investors is optionality: Grok at scale, xAI compute infrastructure, and the orbital AI compute narrative Musk has been building since the Colossus cluster announcement. The near-term financials support none of that valuation; the terminal-value assumptions do all the work.

Nasdaq Rule Revision

Nasdaq revised its index-inclusion rules ahead of the listing, shortening the standard waiting period for large-cap IPOs. That revision means passive index funds tracking Nasdaq benchmarks are required to buy SPCX within 15 days of listing, creating structural buy pressure that was visible in the pre-opening indication process throughout the morning.

What It Signals for AI IPOs

SpaceX is the first of three AI-adjacent megacap companies moving toward public markets. Anthropic filed its S-1 confidentially and is targeting an October Nasdaq listing at an implied valuation near $965 billion. OpenAI has also filed confidentially with no firm date. Both will price into a market that just absorbed $75 billion of SpaceX equity at a 100-times-trailing-revenue multiple — and closed up 27%.

The signal from day one is unambiguous: institutional and retail investors will pay frontier multiples for AI infrastructure stories, even when the near-term unit economics are deeply negative. The question for Anthropic and OpenAI is whether their own revenue trajectories — Anthropic at $30 billion run rate, OpenAI still below that threshold — justify the same pricing logic without Starlink’s cash generation to backstop the argument.

A 27% first-day pop on the largest IPO in history is the clearest risk-appetite test the public AI equity market has faced. The answer, at least for day one, was unambiguous.