Wall Street is going all out to sell SpaceX’s record-breaking IPO.
Elon Musk’s rocket company kicked off its investor road show on Thursday with a major party at JPMorgan’s New York HQ, with CEO Jamie Dimon interviewing Musk in front of 3,500 of the bank’s top clients.
The interview — which Musk tuned in for remotely — kicked off with Dimon effusively praising Musk as the “Edison of our time,” and a special guest appearance from the billionaire’s mother, Maye Musk.
Musk’s pitch to the thousands of investors watching leaned heavily on SpaceX’s science-fiction ambitions.
The world’s richest man said that the monster IPO, which will begin next week and see SpaceX attempt to raise $75 billion at a roughly $1.75 trillion valuation, was necessary to provide the company with the capital to harness the power of the sun and ultimately colonize other planets.
Musk speculated that SpaceX could even eventually branch out into the interplanetary hospitality business with “moon hotels.”
“I think it would be pretty cool if you could vacation on the moon,” said the SpaceX founder, who also mused about the prospect of eventually terraforming Mars to make it habitable for humans.
“If you warm up Mars, you could one day make Mars like Earth, meaning with liquid oceans and life, and where you could walk outside without a space suit or anything. Mars is a fixer-upper of a planet, but it’s got a lot of potential,” Musk told investors.
JPMorgan is one of a host of top Wall Street banks running the books for the largest IPO in history, and is not the only one to embrace SpaceX mania as the listing date draws closer.
Goldman Sachs has decorated the lobby of its Manhattan headquarters with rocket ships, while Bank of America lit up its building in the shape of a SpaceX rocket on Thursday night.
Wall Street’s push to sell SpaceX’s stock comes amid an unconventional IPO process that has seen an unusual focus on retail investors. SpaceX has allocated up to 30% of the total offering for retail investors, far higher than other public offerings.
On Thursday, major brokerage Fidelity said investors would need just $2,000 in their brokerage account to access SpaceX shares, down from $500,000 for previous IPOs.
Trading platform E-Trade also said that Tesla shareholders who had held shares in Elon Musk’s EV maker for at least 10 years would be eligible for an extra allocation of SpaceX shares.
SpaceX’s IPO process has been unusual in other ways. The company said on Wednesday it planned to go to market at a fixed price of $135 per share, rather than the route typically taken by other companies of offering a price range to test the level of demand from investors.
Some analysts have said that SpaceX’s target valuation of $1.75 trillion overvalues the company, which disclosed a $4.9 billion loss in 2025 on revenues of $18.7 billion in a filing last month.
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