SpaceX’s $1.8 Trillion IPO Smashes Records, Electrifies Global Retail Investors

Wall Street is about to witness market history. On Friday, Elon Musk’s SpaceX will price its initial public offering at $135 a share, raising $75 billion and conferring a valuation of roughly $1.8 trillion — the largest debut ever, dwarfing Saudi Aramco’s $29.4 billion record from 2019. The order book has been oversubscribed more than four times, bankers said, with frenzied interest reported not just from institutional giants but from a global army of retail buyers.

Viewed from Tokyo, the event is a rare megaton deal in a market starved of headliners; Japanese brokerages lifted their local fundraising target by a quarter to $2.5 billion as individual investors clamoured for an allocation. In Brazil, BTG Pactual and XP have launched special funds to give qualified locals a route into the offer, while the São Paulo exchange will begin trading a depositary receipt for SpaceX on the same day as the Nasdaq listing, sparing Brazilians the need to remit dollars. From Mumbai, traders chased a proxy: shares of Inox India, a cryogenic tank maker that supplies the space ecosystem, surged 12 per cent as those unable to buy the IPO outright bet on the halo effect. The company has set aside an unusually large 30 per cent of the deal for retail participants, a tactic that has intensified a rotation out of risk assets like bitcoin, which has halved from its autumn peak.

Yet the breathless enthusiasm is matched by a chorus of scepticism from analysts in London, Milan and Zurich. With a starting capitalisation of $1.8 trillion — nearly equal to Italy’s entire GDP — SpaceX is priced as if its promised revolutions in satellite internet, artificial intelligence and Martian colonisation have already arrived. “More elevated the initial valuation, the harder it becomes to generate meaningful returns,” one European note cautioned. The company’s operational numbers are not aligned with its sticker price, critics say, and historical patterns of mega-IPOs point to sharp drawdowns within the first year. Even so, the sheer scale of the offering is expected to breathe life into smaller space firms, particularly in Europe, where German defence spending pledges have already stoked a rally in aerospace start-ups.

The SpaceX debut will be followed later this year by blockbuster listings from AI champions such as Anthropic, creating a pipeline that could reshape global equity indices. For now, however, all eyes are on Friday’s opening trade. Whether the rocket stock soars or fizzles, the event has already rewritten the playbook for how a privately held tech colossus can tap worldwide retail fervour — and how markets from São Paulo to Osaka have built new bridges to participate in a Wall Street show like no other.