SpaceX (SPCX) IPO: Live Updates

Protesters gathered in New York City’s Times Square ahead of SpaceX’s public opening, aiming to draw attention to Elon Musk’s track record on AI safety concerns.

Musk’s Grok AI tool and social network

Multiple international jurisdictions have launched formal investigations into xAI (now known as SpaceXAI), and the company has also been sued over Grok in the United States, including by the city of Baltimore and a group of women and girls directly affected.

SpaceX said in its IPO filing that it had “recorded an accrual of $530 million in probable and reasonably estimated litigation losses” resulting from these lawsuits as of the end of 2025.

Safe AI Now, a group that describes itself as a coalition of concerned citizens, industry and religious leaders, set up a 40-foot-tall inflatable in Times Square depicting a pale, shirtless Musk with the words “SpaceX’s Glock Making AI Child Porn” scrawled across his chest.

The coalition said in a statement emailed to CNBC:

“Musk’s portrait carries a simple warning to investors: Musk developed dangerous and exploitative AI, covered up the damage, merged it with SpaceX, and is now selling that debt to the public for $135 per share.”

They added: “Companies that allow child pornography are inherently unstable, putting American investors and their retirement savings at risk. SpaceX shareholders are on the hook for any future Grok lawsuits, criminal investigations, and regulatory fines. Meanwhile, Musk will become a ‘paper billionaire’ and his investors will pick up the slack.” ” he added.

—Laura Kolodny

According to VandaTrack, individual investors have abandoned investments in artificial intelligence ahead of SpaceX’s IPO.

The market data provider said retail traders are withdrawing AI-related names, including: micron, advanced micro device and marvel technology. Banda said small traders could be raising money for SpaceX’s market debut, in addition to the expected future IPOs of OpenAI and Anthropic.

“Ahead of the IPO wave, we are already seeing signs of retail investors switching away from recent AIs (favorites),” Vanda told clients in a note this week.

—Alex Harring

After its market debut, CEO and founder Elon Musk will own 82.4% of SpaceX’s voting rights, according to the company’s IPO filing. However, you must hold all SpaceX shares for one year.

“We believe that Mr. Musk’s beneficial ownership of our company provides him with a financial incentive to support our success,” SpaceX said in the risk factors section of its prospectus.

After the 366-day lock-up period, “Mr. Musk will have no obligation to maintain any ownership interest in the Company and may elect at any time thereafter to sell all or a substantial portion of his ownership interest in the Company or otherwise reduce his ownership interest in the Company,” the filing states.

SpaceX is officially a “management company” and does not have a majority independent board of directors. Approximately 911 million insider shares, roughly double the number of publicly traded shares, will be made public two days after the company’s scheduled first earnings report.

—Laura Kolodny

In a livestream before SpaceX’s IPO, Musk said he wanted to take the company public as part of raising money for a “major capital effort” to build and operate an artificial intelligence data center in space.

So-called orbital data centers “will be the primary vehicle for expanding AI,” Musk said. Getting data centers into orbit could also help companies avoid community backlash against data centers and the potentially polluting power plants that are set up to operate them on Earth.

“Very few people want to have a power plant in their backyard, so if you want to say double the electricity usage of the United States, which averages about 500 gigawatts, you’re going to have twice as many power plants,” he said.

In space, he thought, companies could run their equipment 24 hours a day on solar power, “far exceeding what we can generate on Earth.”

However, space-based data centers are so far unproven and have many associated risks.

The electronics required for AI training and inference are heavy to lift, consume power, and require temperature regulation. However, cooling in the vacuum of space is not easy.

Peter Barrett, general partner at venture firm Playground Global, said the use of chips with superconducting logic rather than traditional semiconductors could make it impractical to launch satellites full of computing equipment into space.

“It would be crazy to do it the way they are currently planning, but it won’t matter because it will never happen,” he said.

Of course, SpaceX isn’t the only company working on orbital data centers. Alphabet’s Project Suncatcher shares the same ambition. However, SpaceX’s schedule is aggressive.

The company aims to deploy its first satellite capable of providing computational power for AI models as early as 2028, according to its IPO prospectus.

—Jordan Nove and Laura Kolodny

Shotwell said Starship’s orbital flights are “heavily dependent” on the Federal Aviation Administration, but the company should fly monthly and could see Starship in orbit by the end of this year.

“We’ve done the Raptor illumination in space, so we’re feeling pretty comfortable, but the next flight requires another suborbital shot,” she said.

—Chris Udaily

Jennifer Nason, former global investment banking chairman at JPMorgan, told CNBC’s “Morning Call” that SpaceX’s IPO is “a bit of an unveiling” for Gwynne Shotwell.

“Elon can take a lot of the oxygen out of the room, but she was there from the beginning,” Nason said.

—Chris Udaily

“We weren’t sure if we were going to go public,” SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan.

“Today, across SpaceX’s various businesses, we are laying the groundwork for a publicly traded company,” she said in an exclusive interview.

Mr. Shotwell is the company’s top executive under Mr. Musk.

“I don’t want to focus on quarterly profits,” she told Brennan. “I’m not saying we won’t do the right thing for our investors, but what people who invest in SpaceX need to know is that what we’re doing is very futuristic.”

—Chris Udaily

SpaceX will offer 555,555,555 shares of its Class A common stock in the IPO. At a set price of $135 per share, the offering raised $75 billion.

After the June 3 S-1A, the underwriters will have access to an over-allotment of 83,333,333 Class A shares for up to 30 days.

Without the over-allotment, there would be 13,075,865,175 Class A and B shares immediately available, giving SpaceX a market capitalization of $1.77 billion.

If the over-allotment is exercised, the sum of Class A and B shares will be added and the market capitalization will increase accordingly.

—Chris Udaily

SpaceX is a hot topic on Reddit’s WallStreetBets, a discussion forum that has become synonymous with the meme stock boom.

The rocket startup has been mentioned more than 1,600 times on the platform since Monday, according to data shared with CNBC by meme stock tracker Breakout Point. Those numbers made the company one of the most talked about companies on WallStreetBets in the days leading up to its IPO, according to data from Breakout Points.

—Alex Harring

The company has lost about $41.3 billion since its founding in 2002, according to IPO filings.

The company has already spent more than $15 billion developing its massive Starship rocket, which will be fully reusable in the future. Starship is also intended to take NASA astronauts back to the moon and eventually Mars.

SpaceX said in its prospectus that its connectivity division, which primarily consists of Starlink, will generate $11.39 billion in 2025, accounting for 61% of total sales. In the first quarter of this year, it rose to 69% of total sales.

In its prospectus, the company warns investors that it has recorded a net loss and may not be able to return to profitability in the future. The company lost $4.9 billion last year and $4.28 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone, and both capital and operating expenses are expected to rise as it spends heavily on its Starship and AI efforts.

—Laura Kolodny

The funds raised in the IPO will fund further development of SpaceX’s large Starship rocket, which is currently in the test flight stage and is not yet fully reusable.

The company also plans to use the funding for future AI products and infrastructure, including a chip factory known as a Terrafab that SpaceX is building in Texas with Tesla and Intel.

—Laura Kolodny