At precisely $135.00 per share, SpaceX sold 555,555,555 shares of its Class A common stock on Wednesday evening, raising $75 billion in what analysts are already calling the most consequential capital-markets event since the dot-com era. The listing values the rockets-to-satellites-to-AI company at $1.77 trillion — a figure that places it among the largest public companies on Earth before a single share has traded on the open market.

The scale of the deal is most striking when set against history. According to Ipek Ozkardeskaya, senior analyst at Swiss bank Swissquote, the $75 billion raised is equivalent to the combined value — adjusted for inflation — of the 29 biggest IPOs conducted in the United States since 2000, a list that includes Meta, Google, Airbnb, Uber, Snowflake and General Motors. Demand from both institutional and retail investors exceeded the shares on offer by more than three times, according to a report by the Financial Times, suggesting that significant buying pressure could push the price higher when trading opens today on Wall Street. The banks underwriting the deal were also granted an over-allotment option to purchase an additional 83.

3 million shares, a mechanism that could expand the total raise to roughly $86 billion. That provision is typically exercised when aftermarket demand is strong — a condition that appears to have been met. Morningstar and other valuation sceptics had questioned whether a price-to-revenue multiple of 92 times last year's sales was justified, yet those warnings did little to dampen the order book.