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Since SpaceX's record-breaking IPO late last week, Elon Musk's second trillion-dollar company has been the talk of Wall Street. From Musk becoming the world's first trillionaire to SpaceX moving ahead with a $60 billion acquisition shortly after hitting the market, the first few days of trading have defied norms at every turn.
There are too many eyepopping numbers to count, but here are a few that stand out:
SpaceX initially raised $75 billion in its offering, making it more than twice the size of the biggest IPO ever before it.
Oil producer Saudi Aramco raised $25.6 billion in 2019, with that number increasing to $29.4 billion when underwriters exercised their so-called greenshoe option. And China's Alibaba reeled in a total of $25 billion, including the underwriter overallotment.
SpaceX's greenshoe allotment brought in a whopping $10.7 billion. That amount alone is greater than just about any tech IPO to date. Uber , for example, raised $8.1 billion in 2019, and chipmaker Cerebras raised $6.4 billion last month.
Facebook held the largest IPO for a U.S. tech company prior to SpaceX, raising a total of $18.4 billion, including the greenshoe option, in 2012. .
SpaceX staff wore green shoes on the trading floor Friday in a nod to the underwriters' option.
SpaceX's IPO turned Musk into the world's first trillionaire . Musk owns about 46% of SpaceX's shares, a stake worth over $1 trillion, and retains voting control of around 82% of shares. Musk's Tesla stake is worth hundreds of billions of dollars more.
The next-wealthiest people in the world are Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin , each worth close to $300 billion, according to Forbes . They're followed by several other tech founders — Amazon's Jeff Bezos , Michael Dell , Oracle's Larry Ellison , Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia's Jensen Huang.
Musk's fortunes don't sit well with everyone. Progressive politicians, including Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani used the occasion to remind the public of the vast wealth inequalities in the U.S. and the struggles average Americans face with today's rising inflation.
For some investors, the problem is SpaceX's governance. Anders Schelde, chief investment officer of Danish pension fund AkademikerPension, told CNBC that the fund wasn't buying SpaceX shares because "we cannot make the numbers work at the current valuation, and we believe its governance standards are very weak from a minority shareholder perspective."
Other groups have protested the SpaceX IPO, citing issues including Musk's politics and incendiary rhetoric, the company's poor track record with artificial intelligence safety, and environmental concerns tied to rocket launches and massive data centers.
SpaceX saw record-smashing trading volumes in its first few days as a public company.
On Friday, its first day on the market, SpaceX saw $85 billion dollars worth of shares trade hands. Nearly $46 billion of shares traded on Monday, followed by almost $68 billion on Tuesday, averaging out to $66 billion in the first 3 days.
That's more trading than what t…