SpaceX IPO could make Alphabet’s $900M stake worth $87B-$107B

SpaceX is set to price its initial public offering at $135 a share and begin trading Friday on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX. The fixed-price deal targets about $75 billion in proceeds and a company valuation near $1.75 trillion. Reported demand approached $150 billion before order books closed.

The offering reserves 5% of shares for a direct share program whose buyers can sell immediately. Elon Musk has committed roughly 40% of his stake to a 366-day lockup. Early venture investors have indicated plans to realize gains after the listing. “We’ve been invested for almost ten years, it’s our business to return capital to investors,” a comment attributed to Chad Anderson, founder of Space Capital, reflects that intent.

Alphabet paid about $900 million for its SpaceX stake in 2015. An Alaska filing listed Alphabet at 6.11% as of late 2025. A February corporate merger that added new SpaceX shares likely reduced Alphabet’s percentage to near 5%. At the $135 IPO price, a 5% to 6.11% holding would be worth about $87 billion to $107 billion. Across Alphabet’s roughly 12.12 billion shares outstanding, that equals about $7 to $9 of value per Alphabet share.

Only buyers in the 5% direct share program can legally sell without restriction on day one. Other holders face post-IPO lockups; under common schedules an initial tranche can become tradable within days and broader releases can occur over subsequent months. Using a 20% second-day unlock example, about $18 billion to $21 billion of Alphabet’s stake could be available for sale shortly after the public debut. One research estimate placed SpaceX near $780 billion in value, about half the IPO price.

Alphabet also has a commercial contract with SpaceX for AI compute capacity. The agreement calls for payments of about $920 million per month through June 2029, roughly $11 billion to $12 billion annually. Those payments contribute to SpaceX revenue.

Alphabet has outlined large capital spending plans for 2026, with guidance as high as $190 billion. Operating cash flow covered about $174 billion through March. To raise funds, Alphabet recently sold common shares for about $18 billion, issued $16.75 billion of convertible preferred securities that will convert into common stock, and established an at-the-market program that can supply up to $40 billion of shares to the market. Shares outstanding rose to about 12.12 billion this quarter from 12.09 billion at the end of 2025.

A sale of part of Alphabet’s SpaceX stake would provide cash without issuing new common shares. The timing and structure of any sale will determine how quickly Alphabet can convert the paper gain into cash and how much of the stake becomes tradable at once.

Market indicators have reflected investor attention to the potential monetization. Alphabet shares fell roughly 12.7% from a May 18 record through recent weeks but remained up more than 15% year-to-date. Short-term option activity showed more call than put volume at several points, with a put-call volume ratio around 0.49 on June 9 and an open-interest put-call ratio near 0.78. A volume-based institutional flow measure turned negative in early June and later recovered toward zero.

The SpaceX listing will create a public market price that updates daily and will change the valuation placed on Alphabet’s holding as trading in SPCX progresses.