On a Friday morning that Wall Street will study for decades, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. confirmed it had raised $75 billion from the sale of shares to its underwriters, who are set to begin marketing the stock on the Nasdaq exchange under the ticker symbol SPCX. The figure dwarfs the previous record of $24.9 billion that Saudi Aramco raised during its landmark 2019 debut — a comparison that is worth sitting with.

Where Aramco represented a century of accumulated petroleum wealth belonging to an entire nation, SpaceX was founded just 24 years ago in a California warehouse by an engineer who believed, with apparent seriousness, that humanity needed a backup planet. What makes the offering structurally unusual is how the price was set. Rather than waiting for the traditional roadshow to calibrate demand, SpaceX tested its $135 target with investors before the formal process had even begun — an approach that drew four times the number of investors needed to cover the available shares, according to Bloomberg. That level of oversubscription has given underwriters the option to release an additional 83.

3 million shares, which would bring in roughly another $11 billion at the opening price, pushing total proceeds even higher. The immediate beneficiary is Elon Musk himself. He holds just under 850 million Class A shares and is entitled to a further 5.6 billion Class B shares, each carrying ten votes.