SpaceX Prices $135-a-Share, $75 B Record IPO With Unprecedented Retail Slice

Mega-IPOs have been market inflection points before—British Telecom’s 1984 privatisation, Alibaba’s $25 billion 2014 float, or the South Sea Company’s over-subscribed offering in 1720—and they often reveal the zeitgeist of retail exuberance. Today’s listing fuses three longer-running currents: (1) the century-long expansion of capital markets to individual investors via apps and tokenisation; (2) the modern tendency to price growth on narrative more than cash flow, echoing the dot-com bubble’s 1999 peak P/S multiples; and (3) the consolidation of founder-control models pioneered by Google’s 2004 dual-class experiment. Whether SpaceX eventually mirrors Facebook’s post-2012 rebound or WeWork’s 2019 collapse will hinge on a single bet: that a nascent, capital-intensive AI segment can unlock a claimed $26.5 trillion TAM. On a 100-year horizon, this moment may be remembered less for minting the first ‘trillionaire’ and more as a stress-test of how far markets will stretch valuation physics when space, AI and populist investing intersect.