For years, Gwynne Shotwell was not sure SpaceX should ever sell shares to the public. As the rocket company’s president and chief operating officer prepared to take it onto the stock market this month, she admitted as much, just before the firm began meeting investors. “I wasn’t sure we would go public,” she said. “It actually feels like the right time now.”
That right time turned out to be one for the record books. SpaceX raised $75 billion when it listed on the Nasdaq on 12 June, the largest stock market debut ever recorded, valuing the company at roughly $1.77 trillion. Shares were priced at $135 each, then jumped sharply on their first day of trading, closing near $161.
Shotwell spoke to CNBC from a walkway above the Starship factory floor at Starbase, the company town SpaceX has built in Texas. She explained that staying private for so long had let the firm concentrate on building rockets without the distractions that come with quarterly reporting and outside shareholders. Going public, she said, was about something else entirely: letting ordinary people own a piece of the company.
“We’ve been feeling over the last few years a lot of pressure from everyday Americans and our friends that wanted to buy stock, and there was just no way for these folks to get in,” Shotwell told the broadcaster. She pointed out that Tesla shareholders and Tesla staff had been especially keen, given Elon Musk’s role running both companies. Plenty of those buyers got their chance this time, with strong demand from individual investors rather than just large funds.
Not everyone on Wall Street is convinced the numbers add up. Some analysts have questioned a valuation that implies a revenue multiple of around 40 times and an adjusted earnings multiple closer to 175 for 2026. SpaceX has pitched itself as something close to a railway company for the modern age, an essential piece of infrastructure that, unlike a 19th century railroad, also wants to control its own factories and supply chains.
Part of that pitch rests on a market opportunity SpaceX says is worth $28.5 trillion, much of it tied to artificial intelligence and the equipment needed to keep machines connected. Shotwell described a future full of “digital humans,” humanoid robots and self-driving cars that will all need to send data back somewhere, work she expects Starlink, the company’s satellite internet service, to handle. Outside analysts are less sure the firm is ready to capture that opportunity. One specialist at IDC, a research firm, said SpaceX’s current presence in business software and services is close to nothing, even if its long-term potential there is real.
A good deal of that future depends on connections built since SpaceX folded Musk’s artificial intelligence venture, xAI, into the business earlier this year. Spending on that side of things reached $12.7 billion in 2025 and a further $7.7 billion in the first three months of 2026. SpaceX has also struck a deal giving it the option to buy coding firm Cursor for $60 billion in stock, and it is working with Tesla on a giant computer chip plant called Terafab, a project expected to eventually cost hundreds of billions of dollars, with Intel signed on as a partner.
See Also: What does US order on Anthropic’s Latest Models, “Fable 5” and “Mythos 5” mean
Still, the rocket business remains the foundation everything else is built on. Starship, the towering vehicle taller than the Statue of Liberty, is central to NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the Moon and, eventually, to carry people to Mars. It has just completed its twelfth test flight, debuting an updated version called V3. Unlike the company’s workhorse Falcon 9, Starship is meant to be fully reusable, something no other rocket maker has managed at this scale. SpaceX tends to push these test flights hard, on the theory that a failure teaches more than a smooth flight does.
Shotwell, 62, joined SpaceX as its eleventh employee and has run day-to-day operations since Musk made her president in 2008. Colleagues who have worked alongside her describe a leader who fills the gap left by Musk’s more unpredictable style, the one who keeps customers calm and contracts signed while he chases the bigger vision. Asked whether business risks were keeping her awake at night, Shotwell said she did not currently see any cause for alarm.
