Today's Edition
(WASHINGTON POST)
SpaceX was set to debut on the stock market Friday after the largest initial public offering in history, marking a crucial moment for the two-decade-old company that has been influential in artificial intelligence, the internet and national security.
Its founder, Elon Musk, the CEO who holds roughly half of the company’s stock, is expected to become a trillionaire after the stock’s listing.
SpaceX, which priced its shares at $135 each Thursday, was expected to be listed on the Nasdaq composite index Friday and begin trading under the ticker symbol "SPCX”.
SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell was on-site for the opening of the market at Nasdaq’s bell-ringing in New York.
Earlier Friday, Musk issued remarks from the site of SpaceX’s headquarters at Starbase, Texas. The stock market listing was highly anticipated, with an IPO that raised a record $75 billion despite SpaceX’s history of losses, including $13 billion since the start of 2023.
"It is certainly hard to believe that a little company that started in a warehouse in El Segundo [in California] is now going public with the largest IPO ever,” Musk said. "If people had told me this was going to happen, I was like, ‘Man, you must be smoking some really good crack because I think this company’s going to fail.’”
Musk outlined his early vision for the company that would go on to debut on the stock market more than two decades later. "If there’s not a new company the enters space, we will never be a truly spacefaring civilization,” he said.
