Good morning. Elon Musk is taking SpaceX public his way. Rather than following the Wall Street convention of setting a price range ahead of the IPO marketing process, SpaceX priced its offering at a single fixed price of $135 per share, a move that signals confidence in demand but is raising eyebrows among market watchers.
“This would be very unconventional, but the market will see this as a sign of confidence on the SpaceX IPO, while others could see it as a head-scratcher,” Dan Ives, managing director and senior equity analyst at Wedbush Securities, told me. “But it’s Musk and anything is on the table.”
Morningstar Equity Analyst Nicolas Owens offered additional context on what makes the single-price approach out of the ordinary. “Usually, the company and the underwriters will set the IPO price as a range, and they also usually have a bucket of shares they can add to the sale if demand is strong enough,” he told me. On Musk going with a single price: “I think it’s unusual compared to the regular IPO playbook,” Owens said. “In this case, I think the announcement just indicates they know there is enough demand to raise $75 billion,” he added.
Yes, SpaceX is aiming to raise $75 billion through its IPO under the ticker symbol SPCX on Nasdaq by selling 555.6 million shares at $135 per share, bringing the total valuation to $1.75 trillion—well above Morningstar’s independent valuation of $780 billion, which is based on the company’s core launch and satellite communications businesses and the cost advantages they’ve built through R&D and economies of scale.
The offering is structured as an all-primary deal, meaning proceeds will go directly to SpaceX while existing shareholders are not expected to sell their holdings. Existing shareholders, including Musk, will be required to hold their SpaceX shares for 366 days after the IPO, which is a signal of commitment to the company’s current plans.
But the confidence may be partly explained by what’s already baked in. As Fortune’s Shawn Tully recently reported, roughly 78% of the expected proceeds—about $62.8 billion—is already spoken for, pledged to insiders and vendors including Musk’s X Corp., xAI investors, and Valor Equity Partners. That leaves less than $18 billion in fresh capital for SpaceX’s AI buildout, which consumed over $20 billion in the past five quarters alone.
The stakes extend well beyond SpaceX. “This listing represents the first major test for public markets after years of muted IPO activity, with SpaceX paving the way for AI giants Anthropic and OpenAI to follow soon after,” Wedbush analysts wrote in a note on Wednesday. How the market receives Musk’s unconventional approach may set the tone for what comes next.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
