NEW YORK (AP) — Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire after shares of his rocket company SpaceX soared in Wall Street's biggest initial public offering of stock.

Shares in SpaceX jumped 24% after opening for trading at noon Friday, a sign that investors are looking past the billions the company is losing and instead betting that its massive investments in satellites, orbital data centers and artificial intelligence will pay off in the future.

SpaceX opened at $150 a share, then jumped to around $168 around 2:.20 p.m. ET. That price gave the company a market value of $2.2 trillion. Musk, who also is a major shareholder and the CEO of Tesla, is now worth an estimated $1.2 trillion, according to Forbes.

Why SpaceX is going public now

Musk says SpaceX, founded in 2002, is going public now because it needs money to fund its ambitions of putting satellites and data centers in space and eventually establishing a colony of people on Mars.

He marked the opening of trading on Nasdaq by joining a ceremonial bell ringing from Starbase, the South Texas home of SpaceX.

He reiterated his lofty goals “to make life multiplanetary.”

“Not just a few astronauts, I mean literally you,” Musk said. “Whoever you are watching this, SpaceX wants to be able to take you to the moon, take you to Mars and ultimately beyond.”

Known for his technological breakthroughs, as well as wild claims and missed deadlines, Musk was able to whip up enthusiasm for the IPO despite SpaceX losing billions of dollars a year.

Institutional and retail investors alike jumped at the opportunity to buy a piece of the company at $135 per share before trading began. The $75 billion in proceeds SpaceX raised easily topped the previous record IPO from oil giant Saudi Aramco in 2019.

The company trades under the symbol “SPCX.”

In addition to establishing a one-million person Martian colony, the company has promised to save humanity by establishing other outposts in space, launch data centers the size of football fields into orbit and outdo rivals Anthropic and OpenAI in the race to make money from artificial intelligence.

To reach its goals, SpaceX needs billions more than it currently takes in from its rocket and satellite business. Between the start of 2025 and March 31, 2026, the company, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., lost $8.7 billion.

Pros and cons for investors

Wall Street bankers that helped take SpaceX public are enthusiastic about the company — and the big fees they will earn — but not everyone thinks the stock price is justified.

Analysts at research firm Morningstar, which doesn't earn any investment banking fees, wrote that the IPO is “significantly overvalued" because of SpaceX's unproven technology and massive capital needs.

They estimate the company is only worth $780 billion — less than half its IPO value.

SpaceX itself has hinted at the challenges, conceding in regulatory documents that some of its business plans rest on “unproven technologies.” It also indicated that another part of the company, its artificial intelligence business called xAI, has no clear path to profitability and is burning cash to catch up with rivals.

On a livestreamed conference Thursday with the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, one of the investment banks making big money off the IPO, Musk offered few details.

He entertained the crowd with talk of “moon hotels,” a future Martian colony and a network of Earth-orbiting data centers powered by the sun. But when asked about plans for his flagship chatbot offering Grok, he pivoted to talking about his satellites.

How Elon made his fortune

Still, Musk has pulled off the seemingly impossible before.

The now-trillionaire — on paper at least — made his initial fortune by creating two companies, Zip2 and PayPal, that netted him about $200 million at sale. He used that money to start SpaceX and invest in Tesla, and defied the odds by creating a space company that figured out how to reuse rockets and a car company that made electric vehicles cool.

Musk has realized vast sums of wealth for himself, much of it in stock he has yet to cash in or grants for shares he’ll only receive if Tesla or SpaceX hit ambitious performance targets.

His recent pay package from Tesla was so large it even drew criticism from the Vatican. At Tesla, he’s worried shareholders by fighting with regulators or dividing his attention between multiple companies and last year by taking a role in the Trump administration.

But a rising stock price has cured all ills: Since it went public in 2010, Tesla has returned 20,000% for shareholders, or more than $1.2 trillion in investor wealth.

SpaceX is the first of three “megacap” companies expected to go public this year, with Anthropic and OpenAI to follow. Nasdaq even revised its rules to allow SpaceX to gain entry into funds tied to its indexes in 15 days, which means investors will end up buying the rocket maker's shares much earlier.

Not all investors are thrilled about SpaceX potentially showing up in their holdings of index funds.

Officials from pension funds for firefighters, teachers and other workers in California and New York sent a letter to SpaceX last month decrying some of the provisions in its IPO, including mandatory arbitration of shareholder claims and how much power Musk will hold over the company.

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AP reporters Stan Choe and Wyatte Grantham-Philips contributed from New York and reporter Matt O'Brien contributed from Providence.