What Happened With SpaceX?

SpaceX completed the IPO process on June 12, 2026.

For years, investors have wanted to buy stocks from SpaceX like they do from Apple or Nvidia, and a few days ago, they were finally given the opportunity. SpaceX entered the public stock market with a storm, breaking all the records for the largest IPO in history with an initial valuation of $1.77 trillion. But what is an IPO, and why didn’t they do it earlier?

The term “IPO” stands for “Initial Public Offering.” Rather than referring to a company, the term refers to the process through which a private company first offers shares to the public. Going public has many benefits, such as allowing the company to raise money and attract more investors, yet many companies still tend to remain private. The reason for this is complicated, but it is essentially just about weighing the stakes. Going public gives more opportunities for transparency and capital, but staying private gives privacy and control. When a company is first made, it is automatically listed as private. A private company is almost completely controlled by the founders, with little to none outside pressure. This means that the company can take risks that the founders deem fit, and no one has the power to legally stop them. For many small companies, this is often what they need. They can take risks that many people might not agree with, and oftentimes these risks are what lead to the massive corporations we see today. For this reason, it makes sense as to why modern startups are staying private for much longer than companies used to 20 years ago. SpaceX is a prime example of this. The company stayed private for 24 years, allowing them to pursue ambitious projects such as Starlink and Starship. In the eyes of today, these are brilliant pursuits, but at the time, many viewed them as a failure waiting to happen.

Still, while staying private is great to get rolling and to protect private information, the choice to go public is a decision made by many entities. The main reason this decision is made is in order to amass capital. As a private company, the only investors you get, and consequently most of the money you get that is not from the product, are from private investors. Private investors are people or organizations that invest before the company goes public, because they see a vision in the company. The risks are still high though. While they might buy a 100 million dollars worth of shares of a private company, until the company goes public, they cannot easily convert those shares back into money. That means if the company fails, their money is likely lost. That’s why investors constantly push companies to go public. Once public, their money will be safely secured because their shares can be easily liquidated or converted into a valued currency.

Quarterly reports push the company to prioritize short-term goals.

Afterwards, anyone in the world can legally buy these shares and sell them to others, allowing for millions of dollars worth of stock transferring happening over the company’s market every single day. A person who might want to invest in the company could buy shares, while people who are in need of money might sell their shares in return for cash.

So going public seems like sunshines and rainbows, right? Some clear downsides arise very quickly after the process is done. The first is the pressure from investors. Every quarter of a year, unlike a private company, a public company is legally required to report their earnings to the general public. This may not seem like a big deal but for investors interested in the short term money game, it is. Investors start to push the company to focus on improving each quarter which sounds great, but this forces the company to focus on very short term, 4 month goals, rather than take larger risks to focus on long-term success. Once investors start to get impatient as earnings don’t rise, the effects are pretty clear. Investors start to lose trust that the stock price will increase, and they decide to sell their stocks at the current cost so that they can at least get some cash at that moment. This leads to a chain reaction as other investors see the stock price dropping, their stocks losing value, and deciding to sell as well before the stock gets even worse.

In the end, an IPO is so much more than just a company showing up on the “Stock” app on a phone. Going public opens the gate to unprecedented amounts of opportunities for capital and allows billions to own a piece of the company, no matter how small. However, with publicity comes scrutiny. Expectations press down on the company, often suppressing and choking innovation in exchange for the comfort of short term growth. As SpaceX begins its chapter as a public company, its long term success depends on whether it can balance its brilliant scientific risks and innovation that got it where it is today with the pressures that come with publicity.