Rocket or rug? SpaceX lands on Nasdaq at $135 with a 5% sell-on-Day-1 parachute attached 🚀

SpaceX priced its initial public offering at $135 per share on Thursday, June 11, selling 555.6 million shares to raise $75 billion and setting a fully-diluted valuation of roughly $1.8 trillion, the largest IPO on record and well above Saudi Aramco's $30 billion listing in 2019. The shares are set to begin trading on Nasdaq on Friday under the ticker $SPCX. The company reported roughly $19 billion in revenue last year, driven by launches, government contracts and its Starlink satellite internet business, and has not yet posted a net profit.

The deal structure departs from standard IPO convention. While Elon Musk is barred from selling a single share for one year, a 5% direct share program (DSP) tranche reserved for participants chosen "at the discretion of executive officers" carries no lockup restrictions, allowing those investors to sell from day one. Early investors who did not receive a DSP allocation face a staggered release: 20% after the first earnings report, followed by 7% tranches at 70, 90, 105, 120 and 135 days. Chad Anderson, founder of Space Capital and an early SpaceX investor, framed the intent plainly: "We've been invested for almost ten years, it's our business to return capital to investors." The Australian Financial Review reported that a specific hedge fund is already preparing to sell its SpaceX stake as soon as it can.

SpaceX's bitcoin position is also entering public view. The company held 18,712 $BTC as of March 31, valued at just under $1.2 billion at $BTC's current price around $63,500, giving public shareholders indirect exposure to bitcoin through their SPCX holdings. Tesla (TSLA) already holds more than 11,500 $BTC, and reports have indicated that Musk has explored combining the two companies.

Alongside the Nasdaq debut, a tokenized version of SpaceX stock issued on Solana by Backpack will enable onchain trading and redemption of the underlying shares through Backpack's brokerage platform, one of the highest-profile efforts yet to bring newly listed U.S. equities onchain. Morningstar analysts put SpaceX's fair value at roughly half its IPO price and advised investors to wait for the post-listing volatility to pass. The listing lands in the same week as CPI data and a market that has spent the month pricing in a Federal Reserve rate hike, with the founder locked in and his chosen investors free to move from the opening bell.