ToplineSpaceX began life as a public company Friday, with founder Elon Musk ringing the Nasdaq's opening bell by video from the company's Starbase, Texas headquarters—flanked by thousands of cheering employees—as the reusable rocket company debuted under the ticker SPCX in the biggest IPO ever recorded. NEW YORK, NEW YORK - JUNE 12: Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX, speaks via video before the ringing of opening bell at the Nasdaq Marketsite at the launch of the company's initial public offering (IPO) on June 12, 2026 in New York City. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)Getty ImagesKey FactsSpaceX priced its shares at $135 apiece late Thursday, selling 555.6 million shares to raise $75 billion—a haul that surpasses Saudi Aramco's 2019 debut (raising roughly $26 billion) as the largest global IPO on record.The $1.77 trillion valuation from its share pricing makes SpaceX the seventh most-valuable U.S. company, ahead of Musk's own Tesla.Initial interest for shares Friday shows the stock opening at up to $175 per share, up 30% from its IPO price. The debut puts Musk on paper at the threshold of becoming the world's first trillionaire, and is expected to mint roughly 4,400 employee millionaires, including about 400 staffers with holdings above $100 million.Musk used his brief remarks to dwell on the long odds he'd once given the company, telling staff he never expected it to survive.Here's What Musk Said As SpaceX Rang The Opening Bell“Gwynne Shotwell has been an incredible partner and was one of the first people to join the company, and so thank you, Gwynne. She’s in New York, of course. Where is she? [laughter]It is certainly hard to believe that a little company that started in a warehouse in El Segundo is now going public with the largest IPO ever. And let me tell you, 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 is going to fail.’ I mean I gave SpaceX less than a 10% chance of succeeding at all. To be clear, in fact, I told people this, I said, ‘Look, we’re probably going to fail, but you know, we should give it a try, because if we don't, if there's not a new company that enters space, we will never be a truly space-bearing civilization. You know, while the other aerospace companies, they build good rockets and everything, they were simply not pursuing the technology that's necessary to make life multi-planetary, to make Star Trek, to make the exciting science fiction futures that we've read about real, and that's what SpaceX is all about, is to take the fiction out of science fiction and create an exciting, inspiring future for everyone. We want to be able to take anyone who wants to go to the moon, anyone who wants to go to Mars, or anywhere in the solar system, and maybe beyond the solar system at some point—we want to be able to take you there. Not just a few astronauts, I mean you—literally you. Whoever you are watching this, SpaceX wants to be able to take you to the moon, take you to Mars, and ultimately beyond. And I’m confident at this point that with the incredible team that we have here at SpaceX, that we will do that for you.I always think about this. There are always problems on earth. There are always problems on earth. There are always things that we wish to be better, that we want to solve here on Earth, and we should solve them. But there also have to be things that get you excited about the future, that make you glad to wake up in the morning because you can’t wait to see what happens next. And that's the future that SpaceX wants to bring to you.”