SpaceX priced its initial public offering at $150 per share late Sunday, establishing a fully diluted valuation of $210 billion and a primary raise of $6.3 billion—the largest U.S. listing by gross proceeds on record. The company will list on the New York Stock Exchange under ticker SPCE on Thursday. Charles Schwab, Fidelity, Robinhood, SoFi, and Morgan Stanley's E-Trade confirmed retail allocations totaling 18% of the base offering, a structural anomaly in mega-cap debuts.
The deal breaks with convention on three fronts. First, the company reserved 1.13 million shares for direct retail purchase at IPO price, bypassing the typical institutional lockup. Second, SpaceX implemented a dual-class structure that grants Musk 67.4% voting control despite his 42% economic stake, with no sunset provision until December 2035. Third, the underwriting syndicate—led by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley—accepted a blended fee of 2.1%, roughly half the standard rate for an offering of this scale. The discount reflects SpaceX's negotiating position: the company carried $4.2 billion in cash at year-end and faced no funding pressure.
The timing follows eighteen months of secondary-market activity in which SpaceX shares traded privately between $118 and $137, providing price discovery ahead of the public filing. Starlink, the satellite-internet subsidiary, contributed $8.7 billion in trailing-twelve-month revenue as of March, or 63% of consolidated sales. NASA contracts and commercial launch services generated the balance. The company reported $1.9 billion in EBITDA over the same period, an 18.4% margin that improved 640 basis points year-over-year as Starlink moved toward breakeven on a unit-economics basis. Free cash flow turned positive in Q4 2025, ending a seven-year capital-consumption cycle.
Allocators should watch three catalysts in the six months following the debut. Starlink's FCC license for direct-to-device service—expected by September—would open a $14 billion addressable market in mobile-carrier wholesale agreements. The Starship program's first crewed orbital flight, scheduled for November, serves as the technical gate for NASA's $4.1 billion Artemis lunar-lander contract, with milestone payments beginning in Q1 2026. Lock-up expirations for employee shareholders begin 180 days post-IPO, introducing $18 billion in potential secondary supply, though Musk's holdings remain restricted until 2027 under the governance charter.
The retail-allocation structure will stress-test broker infrastructure. Schwab and Fidelity built conditional-order systems that queue retail bids at the IPO price, releasing them only if the opening trade clears within 3% of the reference price. Robinhood's allocation—4.2% of the retail tranche—requires account minimums of $2,500 and a six-month trading history. SoFi imposed no such restrictions. The variance in access terms creates segmentation within the retail cohort, a design choice that limits first-day volatility but may concentrate early gains among higher-net-worth retail participants. The first trade is expected between 11:30 a.m. and noon Eastern on Thursday, following a standard fifteen-minute price-discovery window.