SpaceX’s Record-Breaking Wall Street Debut

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:08)
We have an opening trade.
Shares open for SpaceX. The NASDAQ crowd goes wild.

**David Gura** (0:14)
SpaceX debuted on the NASDAQ this morning after the largest IPO in history.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:19)
There are always problems on Earth. There are always things that we wish to be better, that we want to solve here on Earth, and we should solve them. But there also have to be things that get you excited about the future, that make you glad to wake up in the morning, because you can't wait to see what happens next.
And that's the future that SpaceX wants to bring to you.

**David Gura** (0:43)
Trading started at $150 a share. That's made thousands of current and former SpaceX employees very wealthy, but none more so than Elon Musk himself. It's made him the world's first trillionaire.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:56)
The market has finally delivered its first verdict on SpaceX, so now the focus will be whether those gains can hold as trading gets underway.

**David Gura** (1:05)
In the coming days, more than a dozen ETFs tied to SpaceX are expected to launch, and SpaceX option contracts will start trading on Tuesday. SpaceX successfully made the case to investors that they should buy into Musk's vision, that the company will put data centers in space and transport people to the Moon and Mars. But it's unclear when or even if SpaceX will deliver on that. I'm David Gura, and this is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, I sit down with Ed Ludlow, the host of Bloomberg Tech, to talk about what SpaceX's record-breaking IPO means for financial markets, for Elon Musk, and for other companies poised to go public.
This is a huge IPO. There has been no shortage of, and continues to be no shortage of, superlatives to describe it. Walk us through a few of them. How big a deal is this?

**Ed Ludlow** (2:06)
Well, literally the biggest deal in history. But the way to think about it is, well, why would SpaceX need to raise $75 billion?
SpaceX needs money to buy GPUs and to build satellites that are data centers for space. Money lets them do that more quickly, and they plan to grow from this place where they're doing really well as a rocket company with very successful satellite constellation-based internet to out of this world. Something that's so far-fetched and distant, and money helps. That's simple as that.

**David Gura** (2:38)
How should we think about this company, or how do you describe it so it's not just a company that shoots rockets into space?

**Ed Ludlow** (2:43)
SpaceX has a vision where in the end, most of the money it makes will be from selling AI software to companies big and small around planet Earth and potentially beyond planet Earth. Clearly, there's a series of steps. So in the first instance, they dominate the market of launching rockets with something on them into orbit. And that can be for a government, or it can be for a private company.
They have this cash cow Starlink, which is basically for you and I, like on planet Earth, it's Wi-Fi that works really well. It just happens to come from a satellite instead of coming from cables in the ground. And the next phase of that is to build data centers that are in a satellite form factor, to run AI models, inference around Earth. So, you take all of those things I just talked about, the opportunity is $28.5 trillion, as calculated by SpaceX, and you just say, I either do or don't accept that all of that economy happens on Earth, in orbit, around Earth, and eventually on the Moon and on Mars, yeah.

**David Gura** (3:46)
Break down the level of emotion surrounding this IPO. Yes, it has to do with the size of the numbers, what they're hoping to raise, the valuation, but there's also just so much emotion here as well.

**Ed Ludlow** (3:55)
Yeah, I mean, IPOs are an opportunity to get access to a company, but also to a person. So, for lots of people in markets, they want to be able to buy a piece of Elon Musk. He's still regarded as the visionary, as the real life Tony Stark. Shout out to all my Marvel fans.
For the venture capital firms and the private growth equity firms that have backed SpaceX for a long time, this will be the biggest payday for them in their firm's histories. Simple as that. And the kind of third bucket of it is the retail investor. Like, it will be in the history books. It will be in the textbooks looking back. You know, when all the math is done, retail investors will probably account for, like, more money in this IPO than, say, Alibaba raised in its entire IPO.