SpaceX shares will be offered at $135, raising $75 billion by selling 555,555,555 shares, valuing Elon Musk’s AI-rocket company at $1.75 trillion.
SpaceX shares will be offered at $135, raising $75 billion by selling 555,555,555 shares, valuing Elon Musk’s AI-rocket company at $1.75 trillion.
Those are the initial terms set out by the company and its bankers. There is still a lot to do over the next few days, though, before SpaceX starts trading, likely on June 12.
Those are the initial terms set out by the company and its bankers. There is still a lot to do over the next few days, though, before SpaceX starts trading, likely on June 12.
The IPO roadshow starts Thursday. Now, bankers can begin taking indications of interest and orders from their clients. Those institutional orders will get funneled through S&P Global’s Equity Bookbuild platform.
Equity Bookbuild is part of the market infrastructure that receives little attention. It’s like the table where the banking syndicate sits to review order flow and decide on IPO pricing and stock allocations. Of course, it’s a digital table that can weed out double ordering, assess investors, and ensure compliance with securities laws, among other things.
“It’s the largest IPO we’ve ever done,” says Darren Thomas, Head of Enterprise Solutions at S&P Global Market Intelligence. Large is likely an understatement. The $75 billion raised would be more than double the roughly $30 billion raised by Saudi Aramco in 2019.
There will also be a record number of institutional investors placing orders with roughly two dozen banks. Order activity will be about four times what Equity Bookbuild is used to, says Thomas. “We really had to check the capacity of the system…[testing] the platform speed, scale, and efficiency, with this amount of volume.”
The SpaceX debut is stressing the entire capital markets system. It’s even changing indexation rules. SpaceX will be added to the Nasdaq-100 15 days after the IPO. And S&P Dow Jones Indices is changing the time and financial criteria for index inclusion.
It’s a sign of things to come. Deals are getting larger as companies stay private longer. Through May, S&P Global Market Intelligence counted 55 non-SPAC deals that raised $32 billion. The prior year, there were 87 deals over the same span, but the amount raised was closer to $13 billion. Deal size is up, and that’s before SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI hit the market.
After the book closes, likely on June 11, final SpaceX pricing will be announced. The price or number of shares sold could change some, based on the picture created using Equity Bookbuild. Then the orders flow to the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation. The DTCC is like the back end of trading platforms investors used to enter orders, where buyers and sellers get matched, and transactions get completed.
The DTCC is owned collectively by the banks and brokerages that use it. Its systems process literally quadrillions of trades each year.
SpaceX trades will be added to that total in about a week.