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- Part I: The IPO in Brief — What We Told You Before and What Actually Happened
- Part II: The Day in Trading — Opening Delay, Price Discovery, and the Hour-by-Hour Story The prolonged Nasdaq auction, the $150 open, the $176.52 peak, and the $160.95 close
- Part III: The Demand Side — $150 Billion in Orders for a $75 Billion Raise Oversubscription multiples, retail allocation, and crypto perpetuals as predictive signals
- Part IV: Putting the 19% Day-One Gain in Context Compared with Saudi Aramco, Alibaba, Meta, and the largest IPOs in history
- Part V: What $2.1 Trillion Means — SpaceX’s Rank Among Public Companies
- Part VI: Elon Musk Becomes the World’s First Trillionaire
- Part VII: The Nasdaq-100 Fast-Track — The Mechanical Demand Still Coming 15-day rule, BNP Paribas $8 billion passive estimate, S&P 500 exclusion, Russell inclusion
- Part VIII: The Lockup Structure and What It Means for Supply
- Part IX: What Analysts Said After Day One New Street Research $165 target, Morningstar $780 billion fair value, ARK Invest $3.1 trillion by 2030
- Part X: The Risks That Have Not Changed
- Part XI: What Indian Investors Can Do Now
- Frequently Asked Questions
Part IThe IPO in Brief: What We Said Before and What Actually Happened
In our earlier article on the SpaceX IPO, published June 10, 2026, we covered the S-1 filing, the three business segments, the $18.7 billion in 2025 revenue, the $4.94 billion net loss driven by the xAI segment, Starlink’s $4.4 billion operating profit, the dual-class governance structure giving Elon Musk 85.1% voting control, and the $135 fixed IPO price targeting a $1.75 trillion valuation. We flagged Morningstar’s $780 billion fair value estimate and the index inclusion mechanics as the two most consequential short-term price factors.
Here is what happened. The IPO priced at $135 as expected on June 11, 2026. On June 12, the Nasdaq opening auction for SPCX ran for approximately two hours, delayed by demand so heavy that the exchange needed additional time to match buy and sell orders. Trading began at approximately 11:45 am Eastern Time. The stock opened at $150, rose to an intraday high of $176.52, and closed at $160.95. Day-one dollar volume in SPCX was higher than the combined dollar volume of the QQQ and SPY exchange-traded funds, two of the most heavily traded instruments in the world, on the same day.
Part IIThe Day in Trading: Opening Delay, Price Discovery, and the Full Story
The Two-Hour Nasdaq Auction Delay
Most IPOs begin trading within 30 to 60 minutes of the market open at 9:30 am Eastern. SpaceX did not. The Nasdaq opening auction for SPCX ran until approximately 11:45 am, a delay of more than two hours, because demand for the stock so heavily outweighed the available supply that the exchange’s order-matching system could not find an equilibrium opening price quickly. Nasdaq President Tal Cohen confirmed the delay was intentional, stating that additional time was needed to ensure an orderly market debut. Earlier indications from the auction process had suggested an opening price as high as $175, roughly 30% above the IPO price, before the final auction settled at $150. Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s Chief Operating Officer, represented the company at the Nasdaq MarketSite bell ceremony in Times Square while a simultaneous celebration took place at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in Texas.
Hour by Hour: The Key Price Levels
Part IIIThe Demand Side: $150 Billion in Orders for a $75 Billion Raise
More Than Two Times Oversubscribed
By the close of the IPO bookbuild on June 11, total investor demand for SPCX shares had reached approximately $150 billion against $75 billion of available stock, making the offering more than two times oversubscribed. Some estimates placed the oversubscription ratio as high as 3.3 times, as institutional investors who had not received sufficient allocations in the bookbuild submitted additional market orders on Day 1, contributing to the opening pop.
Retail demand alone was reported to have exceeded $100 billion in orders, an unprecedented figure for any IPO. SpaceX allocated approximately 30% of the offering to retail investors, three to six times the typical retail allocation in a large-cap IPO. This retail allocation was a deliberate strategic choice, as Musk has previously expressed a desire for broad public ownership of his companies. Participating brokerages lowered their minimum investment thresholds to accommodate retail demand, and several platforms reported record single-day account openings in the days leading up to the listing.
Crypto Perpetuals as a Predictive Signal
In the days before the IPO, perpetual futures contracts on SPCX traded on the crypto platform Hyperliquid provided a real-time, crowd-sourced price expectation for the stock. These contracts are not tied to actual share ownership but allow traders to speculate on the opening price. The SPCX-USDC perpetual contract on Hyperliquid recorded $254 million in 24-hour trading volume and $272 million in open interest in the 48 hours before listing, both figures exceeding pre-listing metrics for any previous US IPO tracked on the platform. The contract was trading at approximately $172 to $176 the morning of June 12, foreshadowing a strong opening. The actual opening of $150 was seen by crypto traders as modestly disappointing versus their expectations, which explains the slight slip in the Hyperliquid contract from $176 to around $172 after the opening trade was confirmed.
Part IVPutting the 19% Day-One Gain in Context
Jay Ritter, an IPO expert and professor at the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business, described the SpaceX debut as “not a moonshot, but given the size of the deal, if the stock price holds, there will be more dollar value of early stock returns than any IPO in history.” The comment captured the paradox of the listing precisely. A 19% day-one gain is respectable but not spectacular by IPO standards. Applied to a $1.75 trillion company, however, the absolute dollar gain for first-day investors exceeds any previous IPO in history.
How SpaceX’s Day-One Compares to Other Tech Giants
| Company | IPO Year | IPO Price | Day 1 Close | Day 1 Gain | Amount Raised |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SpaceX (SPCX) | 2026 | $135 | $160.95 | +19.2% | $75 Billion |
| Saudi Aramco (2222.SR) | 2019 | SAR 32 | SAR 35.2 | +10.0% | $29.4 Billion |
| Meta Platforms (FB) | 2012 | $38 | $38.23 | +0.6% | $16 Billion |
| Alibaba (BABA) | 2014 | $68 | $93.89 | +38.1% | $25 Billion |
| Coinbase (COIN) | 2021 | $250 ref. | $328.28 | +31.3% | Direct listing |
| Paytm (One97) | 2021 | Rs 2,150 | Rs 1,955 | -9.1% | Rs 18,300 Crore |
| LIC of India | 2022 | Rs 949 | Rs 872 | -8.1% | Rs 20,557 Crore |
Part VWhat $2.1 Trillion Means: SpaceX Among the World’s Most Valuable Companies
At its Day 1 closing price of $160.95, SpaceX’s market capitalisation was approximately $2.11 trillion. Bespoke Investment Group published a note observing that SpaceX had become the sixth-largest listed company in the United States on its first day of trading, behind Nvidia (approximately $5 trillion), Apple, Microsoft, Amazon (approximately $2.54 trillion), and Alphabet, and ahead of Meta, Broadcom (approximately $1.81 trillion), Berkshire Hathaway, and Tesla (approximately $1.5 trillion).
Part VIElon Musk Becomes the World’s First Trillionaire
Multiple financial media outlets confirmed on June 12, 2026 that Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire as a result of the SPCX Day 1 trading. Musk holds approximately 12.3% of Class A common stock and 93.6% of Class B common stock in SpaceX following the IPO, giving him a total economic interest valued at approximately $750 billion at the closing price of $160.95. Combined with his approximately 13% economic stake in Tesla, valued at approximately $195 billion, and other assets across Neuralink, the Boring Company, and personal wealth, his total net worth crossed $1 trillion. Kiplinger specifically noted this milestone in its live IPO coverage.
Part VIIThe Nasdaq-100 Fast-Track: The Mechanical Demand Still Coming
The 15-Day Rule and What It Triggers
Nasdaq modified its fast-entry rules, effective May 1, 2026, to allow a newly listed stock to qualify for Nasdaq-100 inclusion after just 15 trading days, replacing the previous three-month minimum waiting period. At SpaceX’s listing date of June 12, 2026, this means the earliest possible Nasdaq-100 inclusion is around late June or early July 2026, approximately 15 trading days after the first day of trading. The Russell 1000 inclusion timeline under FTSE Russell’s revised rules could come even earlier, potentially within 5 trading days for CRSP-tracked funds such as VTI and VUG.
The significance of Nasdaq-100 inclusion is mechanical and large. The Invesco QQQ Trust, the primary Nasdaq-100 tracking ETF, manages approximately $330 billion in assets. Every fund and ETF that tracks the Nasdaq-100 is required to buy SPCX in proportion to its index weight at the moment of inclusion, regardless of the prevailing price. Bloomberg Intelligence estimated that SpaceX could carry a 0.47% to 0.70% weight in the Nasdaq-100, which at $330 billion in tracked assets translates to approximately $1.5 to $2.3 billion in forced buying from QQQ alone. BNP Paribas estimated total passive fund purchases, across all Nasdaq-100 trackers globally, of approximately $8 billion in the first month following inclusion, with total passive buying potentially reaching $22 to $30 billion across all index inclusions over the first two months of trading.
What Index Inclusion Means for SPCX Price in the Near Term
The index inclusion mechanic explains much of the post-IPO price behaviour that fundamental analysis alone cannot justify. SpaceX has a 4% public float. When Nasdaq-100 inclusion forces tens of billions of dollars in passive fund buying into a stock with only 4% of its shares publicly available, the supply-demand imbalance will drive the price higher regardless of whether the underlying business has changed. Investors buying SPCX in the 15-day window between the IPO and Nasdaq-100 inclusion are in effect positioning ahead of a predictable, rule-driven demand event. This is front-running that is entirely legal and rational, and it is why Morningstar cautioned investors to wait for the post-inclusion rebalancing to normalise supply-demand before assessing entry.
Part VIIIThe Lockup Structure and What It Means for Supply
Standard IPO lockup agreements prevent insiders from selling shares for 180 days after listing. SpaceX’s lockup structure is staggered, designed to expand the float faster than a standard 180-day lockup would allow. The first window for insider sales opens after SpaceX’s Q2 2026 earnings release, expected in late July 2026, approximately six to eight weeks after the IPO. At that point, 20% of eligible insider shares become available for sale. Subsequent tranches unlock at defined intervals, including after the Q3 earnings release and after the full 180-day standard lockup period in December 2026.
Part IXWhat Analysts Said After Day One
The analyst divergence is unusually wide even for a high-profile technology IPO. The spread between Morningstar’s $780 billion fair value and ARK Invest’s $3.1 trillion by 2030 represents a nearly four-fold difference in assessed value. This reflects genuine uncertainty about the two components of SpaceX that have no public market comparable: the orbital AI data centre business within xAI, which has never been done before at commercial scale, and Starship, which is real hardware that has flown successfully but has not yet demonstrated commercial orbital operations. Investors who buy SPCX at current prices are effectively making a bet on two unproven hypotheses simultaneously, alongside the genuine, proven cash-flow engine of Starlink and the dominant Falcon 9 launch business.
Part XThe Risks That Have Not Changed
The xAI segment, which includes the Grok AI model, xAI’s orbital AI data centre initiative, and the X social media platform, generated $3.2 billion in consolidated revenue in 2025 but recorded a $6.35 billion operating loss for the year. In Q1 2026 alone, the segment burned approximately $2.5 billion. The business plan involves launching AI data centres into low Earth orbit, powered by solar energy, to process data for AI applications. This is not an incremental improvement on existing business models; it is a genuinely novel commercial thesis. If the orbital AI infrastructure strategy fails to find paying enterprise customers at scale, the AI segment could remain a multi-billion-dollar annual drain on Starlink’s profits for years. The S-1 acknowledged this risk explicitly: “We have a history of net losses and may not achieve profitability in the future.”
Starlink’s average revenue per user has declined from $99 per month in 2023 to $81 per month at end-2025, and further to $66 per month in Q1 2026. This represents a 33% decline in monthly ARPU over three years. The compression reflects a deliberate strategy of expanding into emerging markets where lower pricing is necessary to drive adoption, but it creates a tension between subscriber growth and revenue per subscriber. The 63% EBITDA margin is robust at current ARPU levels, but a continued decline to, say, $50 per month average ARPU would materially reduce the operating profit even at higher subscriber counts. The business-to-business segment, covering maritime, aviation, enterprise IT, and government emergency response, shows more stable ARPU and lower churn, but the consumer segment’s pricing dynamics will set the headline narrative for investor expectations.
Musk controls 85.1% of SpaceX’s voting power. Public shareholders cannot vote out the board, challenge acquisitions, or question executive compensation. SpaceX’s charter explicitly renounces any expectation that Musk will prioritise SpaceX over his other companies, which include Tesla, the Boring Company, and Neuralink. The $250 billion valuation placed on xAI in the February 2026 acquisition was set without any arm’s-length negotiation, because Musk controlled both sides of the transaction. The S-1 disclosed $506 million in related-party transactions with Tesla in 2025 alone, including $131 million in Cybertruck purchases. Danish pension fund AkademikerPension placed SpaceX on its investment blacklist before the IPO, citing the governance structure as unacceptable. These are structural risks that cannot be voted away by public shareholders and will persist for as long as the dual-class structure remains in place.
SpaceX has spent more than $15 billion cumulatively on Starship and put approximately $930 million into Starship research and development in Q1 2026 alone. The first V3 flight on May 22, 2026, completed most planned objectives but lost the Super Heavy booster. Starship is the linchpin of multiple revenue streams: it is designated as the lander for NASA’s Artemis lunar programme, it is needed to deploy the next-generation Starlink V3 constellation at competitive economics, and it is the platform for the theoretical Mars programme. If Starship encounters a significant technical setback, the effect on all three revenue streams simultaneously would be severe. No other rocket in the world can replace Starship in any of these roles on a near-term timeline.
Part XIWhat Indian Investors Can Do Now That SPCX Is Live
Indian resident individuals can buy SPCX shares on the Nasdaq through the Reserve Bank of India’s Liberalised Remittance Scheme, which permits remittances of up to $250,000 per financial year for permissible capital account transactions including the purchase of foreign listed securities. Several Indian brokerage platforms facilitate direct US stock investing under the LRS route. The remittance is subject to a 20% Tax Collected at Source at the time of remittance, creditable against the investor’s final income tax liability for the year. Capital gains on foreign equity held by Indian residents are taxable in India: long-term gains (held over 24 months) at 12.5% and short-term gains (held 24 months or under) at the applicable income tax slab rate.
Indian investors evaluating SPCX at the current post-Day-1 price of approximately $160 to $167 should note that the average 12-month price target from analysts currently stands at $139.33, which implies downside from the Day 1 close. Morningstar’s fair value of $780 billion implies a share price of approximately $59 at current share count, representing an approximately 63% downside from the Day 1 close. These are not predictions; they are valuation anchors that reflect the wide range of analytical opinion on a company that is simultaneously running four genuinely distinct business models with very different risk profiles.
The Verdict on the Largest IPO in History
The SpaceX IPO delivered exactly what the mechanics of a tiny-float, index-inclusion-eligible, massively oversubscribed offering were always going to deliver: a strong day-one pop, record trading volumes, and a market cap that crossed $2 trillion before the bell rang. None of this proves the valuation is correct. It proves that demand exceeded supply on day one. Those are different things.
What the day confirmed about the underlying business has not changed. Starlink is real, profitable, and growing. The Falcon 9 launch monopoly is real. The Starship development is proceeding, with three major milestones in 2025 and the V3 flight in May 2026. The xAI segment is a very large loss-generating experiment that may or may not generate profits at the scale required to justify the $250 billion acquisition price. Musk controls 85.1% of the votes and the charter tells you plainly that he owes public shareholders nothing in terms of prioritisation.
For Indian investors who covered this story with us from the beginning, the question is not whether SpaceX is an extraordinary company. It is. The question is at what price an extraordinary company becomes a good investment. Morningstar says $59. New Street says $165. ARK says the 2030 equivalent of $235. The gap between those numbers is not about SpaceX’s engineering. It is about how much you are willing to pay for a future that has not yet arrived, controlled by a founder who has never publicly pretended that your interests come before his.
SpaceX began trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX at approximately 11:45 am Eastern Time on June 12, 2026, after a two-hour Nasdaq opening auction delay caused by extraordinary demand. The stock opened at $150 per share, an 11.1% premium to the IPO price of $135. It rose to an intraday high of $176.52, representing a gain of nearly 31% from the IPO price. It closed at $160.95, up 19.22% from the IPO price. After-hours trading pushed the price to $166.76 by 6:30 pm Eastern Time. Trading volume in Class A shares exceeded 207 million shares, with dollar volume over $33 billion, surpassing the combined dollar volume of the QQQ and SPY ETFs on the same day. At the closing price, SpaceX’s market capitalisation was approximately $2.11 trillion.
SpaceX raised $75 billion in its IPO by selling 555.6 million Class A shares at the fixed IPO price of $135 per share. This is the largest amount ever raised in a single IPO in stock market history, more than double the previous record held by Saudi Aramco, which raised $29.4 billion in its December 2019 listing. SpaceX’s underwriters also hold a greenshoe option covering approximately 83 million additional shares worth approximately $11.2 billion, which could push total proceeds to approximately $86 billion if fully exercised. The IPO was approximately 2 to 3.3 times oversubscribed, with total investor demand reaching approximately $150 billion.
Under Nasdaq’s modified fast-entry rules effective May 1, 2026, SpaceX becomes eligible for Nasdaq-100 inclusion after just 15 trading days from listing, which would place the earliest possible inclusion date in late June or early July 2026. Once included, all index funds and ETFs tracking the Nasdaq-100 are required to buy SPCX proportionally to its index weight. BNP Paribas estimated that Nasdaq-100 inclusion alone would generate approximately $8 billion in forced passive buying within the first month, with total passive purchases across all index inclusions potentially reaching $22 to $30 billion over two months. Bloomberg Intelligence estimated SPCX could carry a 0.47% to 0.70% weight in the Nasdaq-100, implying $1.5 to $2.3 billion in forced buying from QQQ alone. Importantly, SpaceX does not meet the S&P 500’s profitability requirement and will not be included in SPY, VOO, or other S&P 500-tracking products until it posts four consecutive quarters of GAAP profitability.
Yes. Multiple financial outlets confirmed on June 12, 2026 that Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire as a result of SPCX’s Day 1 trading. Musk holds approximately 12.3% of Class A common stock and 93.6% of Class B common stock in SpaceX, representing an economic interest valued at approximately $750 billion at the Day 1 closing price of $160.95. Combined with his approximately 13% economic stake in Tesla (valued at approximately $195 billion at Tesla’s closing price of $406.43 on June 12) and other assets, his total net worth crossed $1 trillion. Kiplinger confirmed this milestone in its live IPO coverage. However, Musk’s wealth is largely illiquid in practice; the bulk of his SpaceX holdings are subject to lockup agreements and selling them in large quantities would reduce his voting control below 85.1%.
Yes. Indian resident individuals can purchase SPCX shares on the Nasdaq through the Reserve Bank of India’s Liberalised Remittance Scheme, which permits remittances of up to $250,000 per financial year for permissible capital account transactions including the purchase of foreign listed securities. Several Indian brokerage platforms facilitate direct US stock investing under the LRS route. The remittance is subject to 20% Tax Collected at Source at the time of the remittance, which is creditable against the investor’s final income tax liability. Capital gains are taxable in India. An alternative indirect route is through India-listed mutual fund schemes that track the Nasdaq-100, such as Motilal Oswal Nasdaq 100 ETF and Mirae Asset NYSE FANG+ ETF, which will automatically include SPCX once it is added to the Nasdaq-100 index, expected in late June or early July 2026. This route requires no individual LRS remittance and allows Indian retail investors to gain SpaceX exposure within existing SIP and mutual fund structures.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational and educational purposes only and is current as of June 13, 2026. All trading data (opening price, intraday high, closing price, trading volume, and market cap) is sourced from Nasdaq, CNBC, CBS News, CNN Business, and Investing.com coverage of June 12, 2026. IPO size and oversubscription data is sourced from Yahoo Finance and Barron’s pre-IPO reporting. Analyst price targets are from New Street Research (as reported by Kiplinger), Morningstar, and ARK Invest. Nothing in this article constitutes investment advice. Investing in listed equities involves significant risk including the risk of total loss of capital. Indian investors should consult a SEBI-registered investment adviser before making investment decisions.








