Startups

SpaceX debuts on Nasdaq as SPCX in record $75B IPO, starting the clock on a $60B Cursor deal

SPCX opened at $150 on June 12, 11% above its IPO price, valuing Musk's rocket-and-AI conglomerate near $2 trillion — and triggering a 30-day countdown to swallowing Cursor.

By Giulia Donatello · Startups & funding · 2026-06-12 · 3 min read

Photo: Unsplash / Nicholas Cappello — Stock market ticker display showing financial data on a screen

SpaceX began trading on the Nasdaq this morning under the ticker SPCX, opening at $150 against a $135 IPO price, an 11% pop that values Elon Musk’s rocket-and-AI conglomerate at roughly $2 trillion on a fully diluted basis. The 555.6 million-share offering raised about $75 billion, which Bloomberg notes makes it the largest stock market debut in history, eclipsing Saudi Aramco’s $29.4 billion 2019 listing by a factor of more than two.

Gwynne Shotwell and CFO Bret Johnsen rang the opening bell at the Nasdaq MarketSite. Musk joined remotely from Texas. The first-day pop pushed his personal fortune above $1.05 trillion, per CNBC, making him the world’s first trillionaire.

The filing arrived under the codename “Project Apex” on April 1, with a 21-bank syndicate led by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Citigroup. The prospectus also disclosed something the price action ignored: $41.3 billion in accumulated losses since the company’s 2002 founding. Robert Greifeld, the former Nasdaq chief, told CNBC that “the debut represents a stock trading not on fundamentals but on aspiration,” and predicted the window is now open for Anthropic and OpenAI to follow.

That’s the macro read. The micro read is sharper.

The IPO starts a 30-day clock on SpaceX’s planned $60 billion acquisition of Cursor, the AI coding startup that hit $1 billion in annualized revenue by October 2025 and now counts 67% of the Fortune 500 and more than one million paying customers. Cursor was reportedly in talks to raise $2 billion at around a $50 billion valuation from Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, and Nvidia before SpaceX stepped in. The deal carries a $10 billion breakup fee if SpaceX walks.

It’s the second leg of a consolidation that began in February, when SpaceX absorbed xAI in a $1.25 trillion all-stock transaction, bringing Grok and the Colossus data centers in-house. A launch company that lost $41.3 billion over two decades is now a public AI holding company that also flies rockets. The order of those clauses is the entire story.

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