Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX)

SpaceX spent twenty-four years as the most valuable private company in the United States and then stopped being private. The listing on 12 June 2026 raised about 75 billion dollars at an implied valuation near 1.77 trillion, the largest initial public offering on record, and the shares now trade on Nasdaq as SPCX under a dual class structure that leaves Elon Musk in voting control. The prospectus reports three segments. Space is the launch and spacecraft business. Connectivity is Starlink. Artificial intelligence is the xAI business SpaceX absorbed in an all-stock deal in February 2026, which brought the Grok models, the Colossus compute estate and the X social network inside the same company as the rockets. On 2025 figures, Space produced 18.7 billion dollars of revenue, Starlink 4.1 billion and xAI 3.2 billion. The registered home moved from Hawthorne, California to Starbase, Texas in 2024, though Hawthorne still builds the Falcon fleet and around 22,600 people work across both.

Falcon 9 is the reason everything else exists. Reusing first stages turned launch from an event into a schedule, and by May 2026 the vehicle was averaging roughly three missions a week with boosters having completed close to 650 landings and reflights. Boosters come back to droneships and to land pads, and the fairing halves are recovered from the Atlantic and flown again. Falcon Heavy covers the heavy end of the manifest. Dragon carries cargo and crew to the International Space Station under Commercial Resupply Services and Commercial Crew, the latter having ended American dependence on Soyuz seats. Starship and its Super Heavy booster are the next vehicle and remain in flight test. Flight 12 in May 2026 was the first V3 airframe to carry a payload, and Flight 13 that July deployed twenty Starlink V3 satellites and brought the ship through reentry with limited heat shield damage. Raptor powers Starship, Merlin powers the Falcons, and Transporter rideshare missions sell slots on a fixed calendar to small satellite operators.

The national security work runs through Starshield, the government variant of the Starlink bus offered for earth observation, secure communications and hosted payloads. SpaceX holds assignments under National Security Space Launch Phase 2 and Phase 3, launches for the Space Development Agency transport and tracking layers, and has been reported repeatedly as a builder of proliferated constellations for the National Reconnaissance Office. NASA pays it to develop a Starship derivative as the Artemis Human Landing System. Starlink terminals have meanwhile become a battlefield commodity in their own right, sold to governments and militaries rather than only to households. The artificial intelligence segment is the odd one out and the newest, arriving by acquisition rather than by build, and it makes the company something closer to an industrial group than a launch provider.