Elon Musk’s SpaceX raises record-breaking $75B after pricing IPO at $135 per share
Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. has priced its initial public offering at $135 per share ahead of one of the most hotly anticipated market debuts in living memory.
The rocket company reportedly sold 555.6 million shares at that price, netting it a staggering $75 billion. Underwriters have the option to buy an additional 83.33 million shares at the IPO price in the next few days, amounting to an additional $11.2 billion. The sale leaves Musk with 82.4% of the company’s total voting power through his ownership of 5.22 billion Class B shares.
Normally in IPOs, share issuers will offer a price range that enables companies to gauge the level of demand from investors, but SpaceX took a different approach, holding a series of meetings with prospective investors leading up to its roadshow launch. Goldman Sachs served as the lead banker in the sale, followed by Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America.
The $135 share price values SpaceX at $1.77 trillion ahead of its debut on the Nasdaq on Friday, making it the seventh-largest publicly traded company in the U.S. in terms of market capitalization. The sale breaks the previous record for the largest-ever IPO held by state-run oil giant Saudi Aramco, which raised $25.6 billion on Riyadh’s exchange in December 2019, valuing it at $1.71 trillion. SpaceX is now more valuable than another of Musk’s companies, Tesla Inc., which is currently valued at around $1.6 trillion. It will start trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “SPCX” from tomorrow.
