Many Elon Musk fans hoping to buy a piece of SpaceX will be out of luck on Friday when the rocket firm makes its record-setting public debut, according to a report.
SpaceX, which is aiming to raise $75 billion at a $1.75 trillion valuation, has drawn more than $70 billion in purchase orders from individual investors, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
While the firm is expected to make at least 20% of shares available to individuals in its IPO, that number would mean most run-of-the-mill investors will miss out while the majority of shares get scooped up by big institutions.
The exact number of shares made available to retail investors is still under discussion and subject to change, sources told Bloomberg.
SpaceX has set an initial price of $135 per share and is selling more than 555 million of them.
The company’s windfall is expected to shatter the previous record set by Saudi Aramco’s IPO, which raised $29.4 billion in 2019.
Overall, SpaceX’s IPO reportedly has four times as many purchase orders as there are available shares.
Market watchers have warned that the terms of SpaceX’s IPO have become unmoored from the company’s fundamentals. A $1.75 trillion valuation would place SpaceX’s price-to-earnings ratio at nearly 100 times. By comparison, Wall Street darling Nvidia has a ratio of roughly 20 to 25.
SpaceX disclosed $4.9 billion in losses last year alone on revenue of $18.7 billion – with the gap expected to get worse as Musk pursues costly moonshot goals that include a colony on Mars and building AI data centers in space.
Despite booming demand for shares, some experts say that retail investors should be wary of buying SpaceX stock at the peak of the trading frenzy.
Analysts at Morningstar said they believe SpaceX has been “significantly overvalued” and is actually worth closer to $780 billion, or roughly half the amount it’s seeking from new investors.
From 1980 to 2024, traders who bought shares in an IPO during the first day of trading and hold their shares for a period of three years saw an average return about 21% lower than if they had invested on a value-weighted market index, according to data cited by the Wall Street Journal earlier this week.
Noted short-seller Jim Chanos described SpaceX’s debut as a “hopes-and-dreams IPO” due to its weak balance sheet.
Meanwhile, some crypto traders reportedly have a much cheerier view of SpaceX’s prospects.
Futures contracts tied to SpaceX’s stock that are sold on crypto platforms Hyperliquid and Binance were trading at $165 as of Thursday morning, according to Bloomberg. That price point implies a valuation of $2.2 trillion – more than SpaceX is seeking at launch.
Aside from its rocket launches, SpaceX’s holdings include the Starlink satellite internet network, Musk’s artificial intelligence firm xAI and the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
SpaceX is set to beat two other AI giants to the public market. Dario Amodei’s Anthropic and Sam Altman’s SpaceX have each recently submitted confidential filings indicating their plans to go public, though the exact size and timing of those offerings has yet to be determined.
