SpaceX went public on Friday, selling 555,555,555 shares at $135 each to raise $75 billion, the largest IPO ever priced. The stock opened at $150 on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX and kept going, trading above $170 at the time of writing, for a valuation comfortably north of $1.77 trillion. The number of fives in the share count is not an accident, and is the most Musk fact in the filing.

The milestone tucked inside the milestone is xAI. SpaceX absorbed Elon Musk’s AI lab in February, along with the social network formerly known as Twitter, and the prospectus describes the whole thing as a vertically integrated space technology, connectivity, and artificial intelligence company. So the first frontier LLM developer to reach the public markets got there as a passenger. You can now buy stock in the company that makes Grok. You cannot buy stock in Grok. The AI comes bundled with rockets, satellites, a social network, and the eventual settlement of Mars, and the bundle is the only unit for sale.

It is worth being specific about what the public bought, AI-wise. Per the S-1, the AI segment made about $3.2 billion of revenue in 2025 and lost about $6.4 billion doing it, while spending $12.7 billion on capex, roughly three times the rockets and satellites combined. Starlink pays for all of this. It earned about $7.2 billion of segment EBITDA last year and functions as the in-house bank. None of that was a secret before Friday. What changed on Friday is that the arrangement got a share price, and the share price went up 26 percent, so the public is apparently fine with a frontier lab that loses two dollars for every dollar it makes, as long as it comes with a satellite business that covers the difference. Which is fair enough. Most frontier labs do not come with one.

The harder question is what SPCX actually prices. A share is a claim on launch, Starlink, Grok, X, and orbital data centers planned with Google, all at once, so Friday’s enthusiasm tells you roughly nothing about what frontier AI alone is worth. That experiment is on the calendar. Anthropic confidentially filed its S-1 on June 1, and OpenAI followed a week later, with both expected to list as soon as this fall. Those will be the first clean public prices ever put on standalone frontier labs, companies whose entire business is the thing SPCX wraps in rockets.

For years the defining financial fact of frontier AI was that the public could not buy any. The labs raised privately, from hyperscalers and sovereign funds and venture firms, at valuations that moved by tens of billions between rounds without a single share changing hands. That era ended on Friday, in the most roundabout way available, and it ends properly whenever OpenAI and Anthropic price. The biggest IPO in history is, among other things, an opening act. The public will pay $1.77 trillion for a bundle with a frontier lab somewhere inside it. What it pays for the lab alone is the fall’s big question.

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By the Control Plane Editorial Team