SpaceX, a private rocket manufacturer, has gone public with an initial public offering (IPO) that has made its CEO, Elon Musk, the first trillionaire in the world. The company’s stock opened 11% higher at $150 a share, giving it a market value of $1.96 trillion.

Investors Flock to SpaceX IPO

Institutional and retail investors jumped at the opportunity to buy 555.6 million shares of SpaceX at the offering price of $135 apiece, making it the biggest IPO in history with proceeds of $75 billion. Musk says the company is going public because it needs money to fund its ambitions of putting satellites and data centers in space and eventually establishing a colony of people on Mars.

SpaceX is the first of three ‘megacap’ companies expected to go public this year, with Anthropic and OpenAI to follow. Nasdaq even revised its rules to allow SpaceX to gain entry into funds tied to its indexes in 15 days, which means investors will end up buying the rocket maker’s shares much earlier.

Not all investors are thrilled about SpaceX potentially showing up in their holdings of index funds. Officials from pension funds for firefighters, teachers, and other workers in California and New York sent a letter to SpaceX last month decrying some of the provisions in its IPO, including the ‘super voting shares,’ mandatory arbitration of shareholder claims instead of the possibility of lawsuits, and how much power Musk will hold over the company.

Original reporting: NBC6 Miami — read the source article.