SpaceX’s blockbuster public offering last week was only the beginning. Elon Musk’s rocket maker and artificial intelligence company has gained roughly a trillion dollars in market value in its first few days of trading, rapidly propelling it up the ranking of the world’s most valuable companies.
SpaceX is now one of the five largest companies in the world, after posting heady gains in each of its first three trading sessions, adding more than 50 percent to its stock since it started trading on Friday. Double digit percentage gains on Monday and Tuesday pushed SpaceX’s market capitalization to $2.8 trillion around midday in New York.
SpaceX began its life as a public company at a $1.8 trillion valuation, which already made it bigger than Meta, Saudi Aramco and Tesla, the other trillion-dollar company that Mr. Musk runs. On Friday, it surpassed the chipmaker Broadcom, and on Monday it overtook TSMC, another semiconductor group. On Tuesday, in intraday trading, SpaceX rose above Amazon and briefly leaped over Microsoft, the world’s fourth-largest company.
Microsoft, which went public in 1986, is worth nearly $3 trillion in market value. It turned a profit of $102 billion on about $282 billion in revenue last year. In its I.P.O. filing, SpaceX reported a loss of $4.9 billion on about $19 billion in revenue in its latest financial year.
SpaceX has already put its turbocharged stock to use, announcing on Tuesday the acquisition of Cursor, an A.I. start-up, for $60 billion. Mr. Musk’s significant stake in SpaceX, which includes a majority of voting shares, has made him the world’s first trillionaire.
Although by market value, Nvidia, Alphabet, Apple and — for now — Microsoft still rank above SpaceX, Mr. Musk is by the richest person in the world, and it’s not even close. Mr. Musk is worth about $1.3 trillion, according to Bloomberg, and the next closest, Larry Page of Google, is worth a mere $314 billion.
