Oh, I forgot the best part.
Months before the IPO, SpaceX took $17.5 billion of old junk debt from xAI and X and parked it on its own balance sheet through a $20 billion bridge loan.
The terms? Repaid within six months of listing.
So part of the $75 billion that retail and index funds just handed over is already spoken for. Not for Mars. Not for rockets. To clear debts piling up at Elon's other companies.
You bought the rocket ship.
You're on the hook for the loans.
BEST. ENGINEERING. EVER.
🚨 SpaceX just pulled off the greatest financial engineering feat of the century. In about a week.
Here's everything that happened, in order:
– Folded xAI into a rocket company, turning "space logistics" into an "AI infrastructure" story overnight
– Priced the IPO at a flat $135. No book-building, no range. Take it or leave it
– Floated just 4% of the company. 556 million shares against 13 billion
– Raised $75 billion at a $1.77 trillion valuation, near 100x revenue
– Lobbied to get into major indices in ~15 trading days. Amazon took years. Forced buying, by law
– Handed an unusually large slice of the float to retail. Tiny supply, an army of buyers
– Watched the stock rocket past $200, up nearly 20% in a single session
– Saw ~46% of the entire float trade hands in one day
– Then announced a $60 billion all-stock buyout of Cursor, the AI coding tool
– Structured it so the higher the stock trades, the fewer shares it has to print to pay
A company losing $4 billion a quarter is now buying AI startups with paper it manufactured out of a 4% float.
The scarcity that pumped the stock now makes its shopping spree cheaper.
This isn't aerospace. It isn't even AI.
It's the finest financial engineering of the century, and it's only week one.