SpaceX Raises Record $75B in World's Biggest IPO

SpaceX raised $75 billion in its initial public offering this week, selling 555.56 million shares at $135 each. The rocket maker opened on the Nasdaq at roughly $175 a share, a 30% jump from the IPO price. That values the company at $1.77 trillion, making it the sixth-largest publicly listed firm in the U.S. The sale broke the previous record held by Saudi Aramco, which raised $25.6 billion in 2019.

The company needs the capital for its plan to build space-based data centers that would run on solar energy. SpaceX lost money last year and its revenue trails far behind other mega-cap tech names. Investors are pricing in future growth rather than current earnings, a dynamic that draws comparisons to the dot-com era.

The IPO comes as a wave of AI companies rush to public markets. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, filed confidentially with U.S. securities regulators this week. The company said it announced the filing because it expected the news to leak. Rival Anthropic, which makes the Claude chatbot, filed confidentially a week earlier. Both carry private valuations near $1 trillion.

Davy Chief Economist Kevin Timony said the AI boom is changing the calculus for new business formation. “AI is reducing the barriers to a new business being created and that offers opportunity to scale, and then you could get opportunities to raise finance again through those sorts of channels,” he said.

Timony sees parallels with the slow recovery in Irish equity markets after the financial crisis. “There’s not a lot of interest in taking out new debt and consequently not a lot of interest in equity raising as a means of financing growth,” he said. Most Irish firms prefer to grow out of existing cash rather than raise fresh capital. He does see signs of a shift. “Maybe the second half of this decade, which we're in now, would see more action than the first half.”

The Dublin stock market has shrunk dramatically. The ISEQ Overall Index, launched in 1988, once held more than 90 companies. By the mid-2020s, the number of actively traded names on the main market had dropped to about 20. CRH and Flutter Entertainment, two of the largest Irish stocks, left for deeper liquidity on U.S. exchanges.

For Irish residents who want exposure to these U.S. listings, two routes exist. The first is through exchange-traded funds via a broker or insurance company such as Aviva, Zurich or Irish Life. Leah McMahon, Senior Financial Planner at Fairstone Limerick, said exit tax is handled for you when you withdraw. “If you go down the route of a trading platform, such as Trading 212, DeGiro or eToro, to specifically buy a share and get growth on it, it is subject to capital gains tax,” she said. Investors must report trades to Revenue themselves. The annual allowance is €1,270, and the tax rate is 33%.

McMahon warned about currency conversion costs and the emotional risk of holding single stocks. “It could be quite volatile at times so people may pull out and cash in their shares when they shouldn't have.”

The soaring valuations raise bubble concerns. SpaceX’s $1.77 trillion market cap puts it ahead of Meta ($1.44 trillion) and behind Amazon ($2.6 trillion). Nvidia and Apple are both above $4 trillion. Microsoft, which hit $4 trillion last July, is now valued at $2.9 trillion. These multiples of revenue and profit are high because investors are betting on future growth.

The dot-com comparison is unavoidable. In the late 1990s, low interest rates and FOMO drove capital into startups with no track record. When funding dried up, the market collapsed. Some companies went bust. Others, like Amazon and eBay, survived. The same pattern could play out with AI. Some companies will fail. Some will succeed.

SpaceX’s blockbuster debut sets the stage for OpenAI and Anthropic, which may list later this year. The market is betting big on AI. Whether those bets pay off is a question only time will answer.