Rephrase the same The new Aladdin is Elon Musk, and the genie in his magic lamp is called SpaceX in a different way no more than 118 characters, as if you were a native American speaker as expert on content creation and dont talk about yourself or your experience

1. The largest share placement in Wall Street history
2. Focusing on AI but completing the Starship super-rocket

Space Exploration Technologies, better known worldwide as SpaceX, the technological flagship of Elon Musk, the wealthiest person on the planet, has just become one of the major players on the Nasdaq index of the New York Stock Exchange.

With huge financial interests in the automotive sector, artificial intelligence, robotics and the exploration of the Solar System, we must take our hats off to Musk because he has managed to ensure that SpaceX closed trading on Friday, 12 June—its first day of trading on Wall Street—with its shares valued at $160.95, a 19.22 per cent increase on its opening price of $135.

SpaceX is now among the world’s most valuable companies. It has managed to sell a total of 555.6 million shares, which has boosted the company’s financial capacity by around 75 billion dollars. And thanks to the company’s share option scheme, its IPO has meant that “out of a workforce of around 20,000 people, some 4,000 employees—from engineers to canteen staff—have become millionaires overnight”, according to company sources

This is no fairy tale, nor is it a story from the Arabian Nights. This is the case of Juan Hernández, a welder originally from Mexico who joined SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch division full-time in 2015. The company states that it granted him 10,000 dollars’ worth of options, and that he has purchased further shares over the last ten years, “bringing his current shareholding to over a million dollars”.

The vast majority of institutional investors and small savers around the world who have chosen to rub the technological version of the new Aladdin’s magic lamp have done so in the hope of making substantial profits. Of course, a minority of space exploration enthusiasts have bought in because they share Musk’s vision for his short-term goal of sending astronauts to the Moon and his long-term ambition to colonise Mars.

The largest share placement in Wall Street history

It is worth remembering that Elon Musk has been reluctant for over two decades to take SpaceX public on the New York Stock Exchange. He wanted to avoid having to deliver positive quarterly results, when his efforts are focused on the long term. But he has had no choice but to give in, in order to finance his massive investments in his own projects, such as the super-heavy Starship launch vehicle and the acquisition of start-ups in robotics and artificial intelligence.

As a preliminary step towards listing on the Nasdaq index of the New York Stock Exchange, SpaceX submitted the documentation required by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on 20 May to enable its initial public offering to take place on 12 June, which obliged the company to disclose its financial data.

It revealed that in 2025 it generated revenue of 18.7 billion dollars, but that its losses amounted to 4.9 billion dollars, driven by its multi-billion-dollar investments in artificial intelligence and the five flights of its super-heavy Starship launch vehicle, three of which failed. It also reported to the SEC that in the first quarter of this year it had generated 4.7 billion dollars and incurred losses of 4.3 billion.

Nevertheless, SpaceX’s IPO represents the largest market capitalisation in stock market history. At around 75 billion dollars, it has far surpassed the 29.4 billion raised by Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company, on the day of its initial public offering on Wall Street in 2019. Furthermore, Musk has successfully positioned the company on the stock market not only as the world’s leading space company, but also as a major and promising artificial intelligence firm.

SpaceX argued in its prospectus filed with the SEC in May that the company’s potential does not lie in the technological capabilities and solutions it brings to the global space sector. Nor does it lie in the more than 10,000 satellites in its Starlink internet constellation. Musk has concluded that SpaceX must focus on meeting the growing demand for applications linked to artificial intelligence and equip itself with data centres positioned in outer space which, in his opinion, “will be more profitable than their ground-based equivalents”.

Focusing on AI but completing the Starship super-rocket

With SpaceX’s IPO, it must be acknowledged that the billionaire has played his cards very well. We must not forget that today NASA is reliant on the technologies and capabilities brought to life by the genius of Elon Musk. The US space agency depends in practice on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets and Dragon crewed or cargo capsules, which are primarily responsible for transporting astronauts, supplies and spare parts to the International Space Station.

Even Europe has had to bow to Musk’s company and the high reliability of the Falcon 9 to place as many as nine of its satellites into orbit between 2023 and 2025. The European Space Agency (ESA) had no choice but to entrust its Euclid scientific mission to the billionaire’s reliable rocket in July 2023. Nor did it have any alternative but to do the same for the EarthCARE and Hera missions, in May and October 2024 respectively.

Even the European Union has had to reluctantly book three Falcon 9 flights to place four of its Galileo positioning and navigation constellation platforms into space – two in April and another two in September 2024 – and one from the Copernicus constellation to launch the Sentinel-4 radar satellite in July 2025. Even Eumetsat, the European meteorological satellite organisation, has been forced to knock on SpaceX’s door to deploy its MTG-S1 satellite into its designated position in space.

However, there are also serious storm clouds on the horizon for SpaceX. NASA urgently needs SpaceX to fulfil its commitments to the Artemis programme for a return to the Moon. In 2021, the company signed a 2.9 billion dollar contract with the Agency to develop, build and test the Human Landing System (HLS), whose lunar landing module must be operational to fulfil the Artemis IV mission – the first 21st-century mission to land astronauts on the Moon, scheduled for 2028–2029.

The sword of Damocles hangs over the super-heavy Starship launch vehicle – 142 metres tall and weighing 5,000 tonnes at take-off – which SpaceX is currently developing. From 2023 until mid-May this year, it has flown on 11 occasions, seven of which were total or partial successes, with the rest ending in failure. It is true that the colossal Starship is in its final stages of development, but the critical tests in low Earth orbit are still pending.

On 12 June, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, Gwynne Shotwell, summarised the three main challenges facing SpaceX. Given its special commitment to NASA and the Trump administration, the first is “to complete the development of the super-heavy Starship rocket so that it can carry astronauts to the Moon during Donald Trump’s presidency”. The second is “to maximise artificial intelligence activities and applications following the merger of xAI with SpaceX”. Alongside this, “to deploy a new generation of Starlink satellites”. The initial result of making a strong debut on Wall Street suggests this will be possible.