SPCX closed at $160.95 on Friday, up 19.2 percent from the $135 IPO price on the largest first day of trading in the history of the Nasdaq. The stock hit $176.52 at its intraday peak, pulled back through the afternoon and settled just under $161 at the bell.
After-hours trading pushed it back up to $166.76, another 3.6 percent above the close.
Volume for the day was 519.99 million shares, roughly double the average daily volume the market expects going forward.
SpaceX's market cap at the close of its first day of trading: $2.11 trillion.
By every conventional first-day IPO metric, this was a successful debut. The stock priced at $135, opened at $150, ran to $176 and closed at $161. The company that raised $75 billion, the largest initial public offering in the history of global financial markets, added another $350 billion in implied value in a single session.
What the numbers do not tell you is what the stock is actually worth, which is the conversation that begins now that SPCX has a ticker, a price and a market of buyers and sellers making that determination in real time every day.
What Do The Analysts Say?
The analyst community that covers SPCX is, as of this writing, extremely young, this is literally the company's first day of public trading.
The price targets on record range from $63 to $190, with an average of $139.33. Two analysts recommend buying. One recommends selling.
The consensus target is $139, below where the stock closed Friday at $161.
That spread is not incompetence. It is an honest representation of the range of reasonable outcomes for a company with SpaceX's specific profile.
Morningstar's Nicolas Owens and Suryansh Sharma described the uncertainty explicitly in a note published before the debut, "Uncertainty is very high" when it comes to SpaceX's business, citing "substantial risks related to strategic execution, technological evolution, market dynamics, regulations, AI buildout, and key-person dependency."
Key-person dependency is the euphemism for what happens to SPCX if something happens to Elon Musk.
The company's entire public identity, its valuation, its mission, its competitive positioning, its regulatory relationships and its strategic direction, is inseparable from the person who runs it and who controls 82 percent of its voting shares.
Every other risk in the Morningstar note is real and specific. This one is categorical.
The bull case, represented by the $190 high estimate and Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, who called Friday "an important moment for the broader tech sector" in the context of "the AI Revolution and data taking this next step forward," is built on a specific reading of SpaceX's trajectory.
Starlink is growing fast, 10 million subscribers and adding between 750,000 and 1.5 million new users every month. The launch business is the most commercially dominant in the world.
Starship, when fully operational, opens addressable markets that no current rocket can reach. The xAI subsidiary, the AI company that Musk built into SpaceX, adds a software and inference dimension to a hardware-and-services company in a way that could produce a valuation premium that pure aerospace companies do not command.
The Iran Peace Deal That Helped The Whole Market
The broader market Friday was given an unexpected tailwind that had nothing to do with SpaceX. Reports emerged during trading hours that the United States and Iran are closing in on an interim peace deal, and President Trump had called off threatened additional military strikes on Iranian targets on Thursday.
The Dow gained 0.7 percent. The S&P 500 gained 0.5 percent. The Nasdaq gained 0.3 percent.
The significance for SpaceX specifically is that the Iran War, which began on February 28, 2026, has been the primary driver of the energy price inflation visible in the May CPI report's 40.5 percent annual gasoline increase and the Federal Reserve's on-hold posture throughout 2026.
A peace deal or ceasefire would bring oil prices lower, reduce inflationary pressure, potentially unlock Fed rate cuts and provide the kind of risk-on environment in which high-multiple growth stocks like SPCX perform best.
SpaceX trading at 19 percent above its IPO price on the same day that Iran peace deal reports first emerged makes it difficult to disentangle how much of Friday's performance was demand for SPCX specifically versus relief about the geopolitical situation that lifted everything.
The after-hours continuation, another 3.6 percent, suggests demand for the stock itself is genuine beyond Friday's macro tailwind.
The Companies That Move When SpaceX Moves
The SpaceX IPO created a new layer of market plumbing that investors are only beginning to map. EchoStar, the satellite communications company that holds an estimated 3 percent of SpaceX's equity, surged 11 percent on Thursday and added another 5 percent on Friday as SPCX began trading.
Options volume in EchoStar was more than 11 times its 30-day average this week. AST SpaceMobile, the satellite direct-to-cell company whose technology competes and potentially cooperates with Starlink's infrastructure, jumped 12 percent Thursday on nearly $140 million in options trading.
The emergence of SPCX as a publicly traded stock gives investors who want specific exposure to different parts of the satellite and space economy a new reference point that will reprice the valuations of adjacent companies.
The market is working out, in real time, what the right relative valuation is between SPCX, EchoStar, AST SpaceMobile, Rocket Lab and other companies whose businesses intersect with SpaceX's.
What Comes Next For SPCX
SpaceX's first day of trading is also, per NPR's coverage, the first of three significant tests of investor appetite for AI-related technology companies going public.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic, the two most prominent private AI companies, have filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission that signals intent to list shares.
Analysts expect both offerings could arrive as early as this fall.
The question SPCX's first day answered is whether institutional and retail investors have the appetite to value an AI-adjacent technology company at more than $2 trillion before its first earnings report as a public company.
The answer on Friday was yes, at $161 per share with a $2.11 trillion market cap, a EPS of negative $2.94 on a GAAP basis and a business plan that includes colonizing Mars.
If OpenAI and Anthropic are watching, the SpaceX debut told them something useful about what the market will pay for ambition when the underlying business is real.
The closing bell rang. SPCX finished at $160.95. The largest IPO in history is now a public stock.