JIM WATSON / Getty Images
SpaceX filed terms for its initial public offering Wednesday, disclosing plans to sell 555,555,555 shares of Class A common stock at $135 apiece, raising close to $75 billion at a valuation of approximately $1.75 trillion.
If completed at those terms, the offering would eclipse Saudi Aramco's 2019 record of $29.4 billion, which has stood as the largest IPO in history. At its target valuation, SpaceX would rank among the ten most valuable U.S.-listed companies, ahead of Meta $META +4.24% Platforms, Berkshire Hathaway $BRK.B +0.82%, and Tesla $TSLA -0.01%, the company said in the filing.
SpaceX broke with standard IPO practice by declaring a fixed price rather than a preliminary range that could be refined after investor meetings. Under the conventional IPO process, a company announces a preliminary price range before investor meetings, giving it room to move the final number up or down depending on how much appetite it encounters. According to Reuters, SpaceX's decision to publish a price before its roadshow has few if any precedents among major U.S. IPOs. People close to the deal told The Wall Street Journal that SpaceX settled on a single number partly to strip out the uncertainty that typically surrounds the pricing process and to make its upcoming investor meetings more straightforward.
