Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) concluded its first week as a public company with a market valuation above $2.2 trillion, instantly placing it among the six most valuable listed enterprises on earth and propelling founder Elon Musk’s net worth past $1 trillion. The initial public offering—the largest in history—saw shares surge from a $135 guide price to settle near $185 by Thursday’s close, a rise of roughly 37 per cent, before profit-taking trimmed gains in subsequent sessions. Musk, whose holding now dwarfs the combined fortunes of Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, became the world’s first trillionaire on paper as the stock began trading.

The IPO weight rests not on SpaceX’s core aerospace revenues, which generated $18.7 billion last year alongside a net loss of nearly $5 billion, but on its self-declared addressable market of $28.5 trillion—almost entirely attributed to artificial intelligence infrastructure and applications. Ahead of the listing, SpaceX merged with Musk’s AI venture xAI and its social-media platform X, and used its inflated equity to announce a $60 billion all-stock takeover of Anysphere, maker of the AI coding agent Cursor. Plans for a $20 billion bond offering are also in motion, people familiar with the matter said, to fund an AI spending bill that Oppenheimer analysts expect to surpass $49 billion this year. “From a strict corporate finance perspective, the valuation makes no sense,” a deal adviser told the Financial Times, “but Elon is great at getting people to dream.”

The debut has already catalysed a rebranding of the tech oligarchy. Vanda Research, a US analytics firm, coined the “FAB 10”—Frontier AI & Big Tech—adding SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic to the incumbent “Magnificent Seven.” Viewed from São Paulo, analysts at Genial Investimentos note that buyers are wagering on a vision, not current earnings. In Buenos Aires, fund managers at Guardian Capital expect the firms to dominate the global economy, while warning of near-term volatility. Retail investors poured more than $300 million into the stock over its first three days before pulling back, and share-price swings of 5 to 7 per cent a session became routine, underscoring the speculative tension between promise and profit.

With SpaceX’s losses widening to over $4.3 billion in the first quarter and its business mix increasingly tilted toward AI, the next milestones will test the narrative. The company must close the Anysphere acquisition and execute the bond issuance, likely facing scrutiny over how its valuation maps to tangible AI revenues. Market participants will also monitor whether the broader basket of AI-dominant names sustains investor appetite now that the FAB 10—rather than the old seven—defines the frontier of equity hype.