– SpaceX had the largest stock-market debut in history when it went public on June 12. The company raised US$75 billion (S$96.3 billion) in the initial public offering and ended its first day on the public markets with a market capitalisation of around US$2.2 trillion.The IPO turned SpaceX founder Elon Musk into the world’s first trillionaire.The public listing has been a closely watched spectacle as investors got a chance to buy into Musk’s vision to create a combined space, satellite and AI powerhouse. His long list of growth plans – including putting data centres in space – are hugely ambitious but also come with high costs, significant risks and could take many years to come to fruition.Here’s what you should know about the SpaceX IPO:SpaceX shares climbed 19 per cent on their first day to close at US$160.95. That brought SpaceX’s market capitalisation to around US$2.2 trillion, making it the sixth-highest valued public company in the world.As a private company, SpaceX generated significant cash flow, largely from Starlink, its satellite-based internet broadband service. But the company will require a lot more money to fund its biggest ambitions. SpaceX has indicated that IPO proceeds will be used, among other things, to expand the company’s AI computing infrastructure, enhance its space infrastructure and rockets and boost its satellite constellations.SpaceX could have opted to continue raising capital in private markets rather than going public. But the company’s funding needs appear to have risen substantially with the acquisition in February of xAI, which is burning through around US$1 billion of cash per month to cover the cost of computing infrastructure, including training its AI models, according to people briefed on the company’s financials. In addition, being a public company with the ability to tap the broader market for funds could help SpaceX’s AI business raise money faster than rivals OpenAI and Anthropic before they go public themselves, as they all spend hundreds of billions of dollars on their AI dreams. The company morphed from a relative underdog in the space industry to an aerospace behemoth that receives billions of dollars in government contracts and serves as a backbone for the US space program. In addition to its rocket launch business, Starlink and xAI, which developed the Grok chatbot, SpaceX owns the microblogging site previously known as Twitter.As a result of the xAI deal, the company has increasingly become a bet on AI. In fact, SpaceX said that AI represents US$26.5 trillion of the company’s quantifiable total addressable market, or maximum revenue, of US$28.5 trillion, by far the largest in history, according to paperwork filed ahead of the IPO.For SpaceX, the downside of going public is that the company will have to publicly report its financials every quarter and answer to Wall Street analysts and public investors. Its plans also could be disrupted if its stock price is volatile or falls sharply in reaction to bad news. Despite all the enthusiasm for the listing, many investors remain skeptical that a company that has yet to turn a profit deserves such a hefty valuation. xAI is burning a lot of cash, potentially diluting the appeal of SpaceX’s other businesses, especially Starlink.SpaceX also faces intense competition in AI. OpenAI and Anthropic have filed confidentially to go public and might have IPOs as soon as the fall. The private valuations of both companies already have soared into the hundreds of billions of dollars and look poised to top $1 trillion as public companies.Musk tightly controls SpaceX, mainly because he owns most of the company’s super-voting Class B shares. Documents filed ahead of the IPO revealed that Musk, the Tesla Inc. co-founder and world’s richest person, will have roughly 82 per cent of the voting power after the listing.Investors enthralled by SpaceX’s potential and Musk’s track record likely aren’t bothered by this, but it could present problems if something went wrong and investors wanted a change at the helm. BLOOMBERG