‘SpaceX wants to be able to take you to the moon’: Elon Musk addresses Nasdaq ahead of SpaceX IPO

Today could mark one of the biggest days in stock market history—or set the stage for one of its greatest flops. SpaceX, the most hotly anticipated stock market debut ever, is set to be offered to the public any minute now as investors eagerly await its debut on both the Nasdaq Global Select Market and Nasdaq Texas under the ticker SPCX, capping a 24-year run as the most valuable, and most scrutinized, private company in the world.

Ahead of the debut, the rocket, satellite and AI company’s CEO Elon Musk addressed Nasdaq, saying the company has its sights set far beyond the earth’s borders. “SpaceX wants to be able to take you to the moon,” Musk said. “I am confident at this point that with the incredible team that we have here at SpaceX, that we will do that for you.”

He told the crowd of SpaceX employees that at first, he didn’t have high hopes for the company that could potentially make him the world’s first trillionaire. “I gave SpaceX less than a 10% chance of succeeding at all.”

“That’s what SpaceX is all about, is take science fiction and create an exciting, inspiring future for everyone,” Musk said. “We want to be able to take anyone who wants to go to the moon, anyone who wants to go to Mars… not just a few astronauts, I mean, you, literally you.”

“There are always problems on Earth,” he continued. “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.”

The offering priced Thursday afternoon—which was announced in a free-writing prospectus filed with the SEC just after 3 p.m. ET, while markets were still open—was at $135 a share for 555.6 million shares, raising the $75 billion the company targeted and valuing it at $1.77 trillion. Underwriters hold a 30-day option to purchase up to 83.3 million additional shares, which would lift the total raise to $86.25 billion.

That valuation makes it the largest IPO in stock market history: the raise is nearly triple the previous record, set when Saudi Aramco collected $25.6 billion on Riyadh’s exchange in December 2019 at a $1.71 trillion valuation. (One caveat for the record books: in inflation-adjusted terms, Aramco raised the equivalent of $33.2 billion at a $2.21 trillion valuation—so by that measure, the Saudi oil giant’s crown isn’t fully relinquished.) The offering covers only about 4% of SpaceX’s roughly 13.08 billion shares outstanding, making the company worth more today than Tesla was the day it became the world’s most valuable automaker.

The $1.77 trillion price tag instantly makes SpaceX the sixth-most valuable company in the U.S.........

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