Wall Street Gears Up for Historic SpaceX IPO, Retail Investor Subscriptions Top $100 Billion

On June 12, Elon Musk’s SpaceX filed for a $75 billion IPO, offering 5.556 billion shares at $135 apiece—a valuation that pushed it past Tesla to become the U.S.’s seventh-largest company by market cap. The space firm is set to make its Nasdaq debut this Friday in what’s shaping up to be the biggest IPO in U.S. history. Investor enthusiasm for SpaceX’s offering is off the charts. U.S. retail investors have snapped up more than $100 billion in shares, well over the fundraising target, while institutional demand is four times the number of shares being offered. Blackrock alone has placed an order worth at least $5 billion, and SpaceX says it will reserve at least 20% of its shares for retail buyers. Prediction market platform Polymarket shows traders put an 84% chance SpaceX will top $1.8 trillion in market cap on its first trading day, with a 69% probability it’ll even hit $2 trillion. Pre-IPO perpetual contracts from Hyperliquid signal the stock could jump more than 20% in its debut session. To handle what could be record-breaking trading volume, Nasdaq, Citadel Securities, Jane Street, and S&P Global have run stress tests and simulations for weeks. S&P Global added that it’s boosted its system’s processing capacity by roughly 200%, calling the expected volume “unprecedented.” The market’s extra caution partly stems from the crippling technical mess during Facebook’s 2012 IPO. Nasdaq has since upgraded its core systems and rolled out backup trading platforms to avoid a repeat of that fiasco. Even with a 15% year-over-year jump in first-quarter revenue to $46.9 billion, SpaceX posted a net loss of $4.28 billion in the period, bringing its total cumulative loss since launching in 2002 to roughly $41.3 billion. The company’s prospectus also warns there’s no guarantee it will ever turn a profit. Wall Street firms remain bullish on SpaceX. Oppenheimer has slapped an “Outperform” rating on the stock with a $190 price target; New Street Research has set a $165 target, arguing the company’s AI business alone is worth about $575 billion. Argent Capital Management portfolio manager Jed Ellerbroek noted: “Every investment management firm in the U.S. is talking about SpaceX—we all know Friday’s trading is going to be wildly volatile.”