SpaceX closed its first day of trading on Friday at $160.95, up 19 percent from its $135 offer price, raising roughly $75 billion and setting a record for U.S. public offerings by both share count and proceeds. More than 555 million shares changed hands at offering; by early afternoon, more than 360 million had traded on the open market, a first-day volume Nasdaq President Nelson Griggs flagged as roughly ten times that of Cerebras, this year’s previous largest listing.

The debut, under the ticker SPCX, briefly carried the company to an intraday high of $168.75 and a market value near $2.21 trillion, within striking distance of Amazon’s roughly $2.54 trillion. Goldman Sachs led the underwriting; Morgan Stanley ran stabilization. The opening trade printed at $150 on 58 million shares.

About an hour before the bell, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 from its Starbase facility in Texas carrying a batch of Starlink satellites. It was the 650th flight of the vehicle. The choreography wasn’t subtle.

What’s being priced isn’t a rocket company. In February, SpaceX absorbed Elon Musk’s xAI, folding the chatbot Grok, xAI’s data centers, and the social network X into a single balance sheet. The prospectus describes a $28.5 trillion total addressable market and gestures at A.I. microchips and “orbital A.I. compute infrastructure.” Morningstar’s discounted-cash-flow model values the company at $780 billion, less than half the closing market cap. SpaceX, founded in 2002, posted a $4.3 billion net loss in the first quarter of 2026 and has accumulated $41.3 billion in losses since inception. Musk retains roughly 85 percent of the voting power.

Within days, the rest of the A.I. cohort moved. Anthropic, which closed a $65 billion round at a $965 billion post-money valuation, filed confidentially on June 1; the Bloomberg framing leaned on surging Claude demand and run-rate revenue of $47 billion. OpenAI, last valued at $852 billion and generating $2 billion in monthly revenue as of March, filed on June 8, with a blog post conceding the timing was undecided.

The pattern recalls the late-1999 rush, when a debut at a stretched multiple pulled the rest of the cohort through the window before sentiment could shift. Nigel Green, chief executive of deVere Group, put the discipline question plainly: “Expectations that seem manageable in private markets can become relentless under the glare of public ownership.”

Friday priced the optionality. The quarterly cadence will price the company.

Sources