Musk opens – Elon Musk opened the Nasdaq on Friday, June 12, as shares became available for SpaceX’s IPO—an event he said he once expected the company to fail. He also used the moment to reaffirm SpaceX’s broader ambition, from building multi-planetary technology to deploy
For SpaceX, Friday morning arrived with a kind of gamble that Elon Musk didn’t hide.
When Musk opened the Nasdaq on Friday, June 12, he wasn’t just signaling that shares of his commercial rocket company were ready for trading. He was also recalling that, at one point, he believed the IPO launch itself might not make it to the finish line.
Musk said he thought SpaceX “going to fail” as he spoke in a Friday morning address. delivering remarks through a video link connecting SpaceX headquarters with the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York. The IPO became the biggest IPO ever. and it propelled Musk—who co-founded and leads Tesla. Neuralink and The Boring Company—into a new level of headline status as he was described as the world’s first trillionaire.
As the bell opened the market, Musk’s message widened beyond the stock debut. He described SpaceX’s mission as meaningfully different from competing space companies, including Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin—framing the gap as a question of what technologies are pursued and which future they serve.
“They were simply not pursuing the technology that’s necessary to make life multi-planetary, to make ‘Star Trek,’ to make the exciting science fiction futures that we’ve read about real,” Musk said. “That’s what SpaceX is all about … to take the fiction out of science fiction.”
That ambition is tied to multiple projects SpaceX has already built out, including Starlink, the internet service. Musk has also said he wants the company to launch up to 1 million AI satellites into space to operate orbital data centers. He has ownership of the social media platform X. and the structure of his companies has drawn attention to how the IPO lands within a broader ecosystem that extends far beyond rockets.
SpaceX’s origin story adds to the contrast. Founded in 2002, Musk said the company once looked like a long shot. Opening Nasdaq as if to underline that shift—from uncertainty to a historic listing—placed that belief right at the center of the day.
Musk also reiterated plans for SpaceX to build a city on the moon as part of its goal to colonize Mars, placing the IPO day in the context of something far longer than the near-term trading window.
The arc of Friday’s event was hard to miss: a company Musk once expected could fail arrived at the public markets as the biggest IPO ever. with Musk using the opening bell to tie a single trading moment to a sprawling set of goals—AI satellite deployments. a Starlink-enabled infrastructure. and a moon city in the orbit of a Mars future.
SpaceX IPO Nasdaq Elon Musk Starlink AI satellites orbital data centers Blue Origin Tesla Neuralink The Boring Company moon city Mars