SpaceX’s planned $75 billion initial public offering would dwarf every major stock market debut on record, highlighting just how unusual Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite company is compared with even the world’s largest public companies.
The proposed deal size is three times larger than Saudi Aramco’s $25.6 billion IPO in 2019, which currently stands as the largest completed public offering.
It would also far exceed other blockbuster listings including Alibaba, Visa, Meta and SoftBank.
The interactive scatter plot shows that many of today’s most valuable technology companies entered public markets through comparatively modest offerings.
Apple raised about $101 million in its 1980 IPO, Microsoft raised $61 million in 1986, and Amazon raised just $54 million in 1997.
Even among the top tech giants, no company has even come close to raising tens of billions of dollars when it first went public.
Meta’s 2012 IPO itself was close to $16 billion and is considered one of the largest technology offerings in history.
At a proposed valuation of roughly $1.8 trillion, SpaceX would immediately rank among the most valuable companies in the U.S. market.
If completed as planned, the offering would rewrite the IPO record books, both in terms of capital raised and the valuation attached to a newly public company.
Key takeaway: SpaceX is not just aiming to become the biggest IPO ever – it is attempting a public debut on a scale that makes even the largest listings of the past two decades look small.
A lot, of course, depends on whether it delivers what it promises.