By Kenneth G. Pringle
SpaceX's $75 billion initial public offering shattered market records, turned founder Elon Musk into the world's first trillionaire, and opened fresh debates over corporate valuations and governance.
It's not the first time an IPO has shaken things up.
IPOs have been reshaping markets since the Bank of North America's 1783 debut got it all started for the young republic.
The railroad craze of the 19th century expanded investing for the first time to include mom and pop. Sears, Roebuck's 1906 IPO signaled the rise of retail -- and of Goldman Sachs as it led its first initial public offering -- while 50 years later young car scion Henry Ford II demonstrated how to sell your company and keep it, too.
Hewlett Packard went public in 1957, and "Silicon Valley" soon entered the lingo as a term for big tech and big valuations. IPOs kept growing: AT&T Wireless, $10.6 billion (2000); Facebook, $16 billion (2012); Alibaba, $22 billion (2014).
Now SpaceX holds the record. It could be fleeting, with OpenAI and Anthropic planning their own AI-powered, mega-IPOs. There's always a new big thing.
The first big thing the young republic needed, according to Alexander Hamilton, was a national bank. His model was the Bank of England, whose funding was key to Britain's industrial revolution, which Hamilton wanted the U.S. to emulate.
"Are our moneyed men less enlightened to their own interest, or less enterprising in the pursuit?," the future Treasury secretary wrote in 1780. "[W]hy can we not have an American Bank?"
The Bank of North America was chartered the next year in Philadelphia. It had limited powers compared with modern central banks, but it helped stabilize the nation's finances.
And its IPO -- 1,000 shares at $400 each -- kicked off a lively trade, at least once the federal government took up 633 shares (backed by a loan from France). Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson were early subscribers, but most shares were owned by Philadelphians. Other cities were envious.
In 1784, the Massachusetts Bank was founded in Boston to serve New England's textile manufacturers. A few months later, Hamilton organized the Bank of New York to finance the shipping industry.
With the establishment of stock exchanges in Philadelphia (1790) and New York (1792), and a true central bank with the first Bank of the United States (1791), a thriving financial market took root in American soil.
Railroads were the nation's first big businesses. Like the banks, they were organized to fill commercial needs.
The Baltimore & Ohio, the nation's first operating line, started in 1830, was financed by Baltimore merchants wanting a piece of the growing markets across the Appalachian Mountains.
The B&O was capitalized at $3 million, with half of the stock sold to the state of Maryland and the city of Baltimore, the other half to an eager public.
"More than a quarter of Baltimore's populace -- around twenty-two thousand people -- bought a piece of the railroad, some acquiring as little as a fraction of a share of the oversubscribed stock," David Schley writes in Steam City: Railroads, Urban Space, and Corporate Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Baltimore.
This started a national railroad boom. Yet even as tracks crisscrossed the nation, the bubble burst several times, the worst causing the Panic of 1873 and throwing the nation into depression.
By the turn of the 20th century, the combined trends of industrialization and urbanization created a new class of American, the consumer.
The consumer's arrival was heralded on Wall Street in 1906 by the $40 million IPO of Sears, Roebuck, whose mail-order catalog brought store goods to even isolated rural homes. It also made Richard W. Sears rich and famous.
"Sears' Rise Wall Street's Wonder," was the Richmond, Va., Times headline on June 10, 1906, announcing the IPO. "Got Millions in 15 Years."
Goldman Sachs helped sell the IPO with a new concept, the price-to-earnings ratio, a measure for companies that lacked the hard assets of a railroad or steel maker.
This opened Wall Street's door to a growing retail sector and vast new pools of capital. Goldman led the way, underwriting offerings from retail titans including F.W. Woolworth (1912), Merck (1919) and General Foods (1922).
The Sears IPO wasn't universally welcomed.
"A Big Trust: Sears, Roebuck & Co. Sold Out to Wall Street," was the Cache, Okla., Register's headline on June 29, 1906.
Middle America's skepticism of Wall Street is old and runs deep, and may be seen today among those worried about SpaceX in their 401(k)s
Henry Ford shared that skepticism.
"I'm not 'under' Wall Street," the nation's second-richest man (after John D. Rockefeller) declared, siding with his Middle America customers and keeping tight control of Ford Motor until his 1947 death.
Henry Ford II, who inherited his grandfather's company, had a better relationship with Wall Street. Goldman Sachs' senior partner Sidney Weinberg was a close adviser, and in 1956 he guided Ford Motor to a record-setting $657.9 million IPO.
It caused a buying frenzy.
"Weary Brokers Say They Must Ration, Not Sell Ford Stock," The Wall Street Journal wrote Jan. 17, 1956, as the iconic car maker's 10.2 million shares didn't come close to filling demand.
While Ford II agreed to go public, he didn't cede control. Using Class B voting shares, he kept nearly as tight a grip on Ford Motor as his grandfather had.
The earliest Silicon Valley IPOs, including Varian Associates (1956) and Hewlett Packard (1957), were relatively small sales to raise capital to avoid getting acquired.
By 1980, Apple's IPO was about buying a chunk of a bright, shiny -- and lucrative -- high-tech future.
"Not since Eve has an apple posed such temptation," The Wall Street Journal wrote Nov. 7, 1980, as the computer maker's $110 million IPO was the largest since Ford's.
Netscape's 1995 IPO was something new, a company not yet profitable but in such demand that pricing quickly doubled. This became known as the Big Bang IPO, the moment Wall Street and Main Street fell hard for the future promises of high-tech.
It was also a warning: Netscape lost the "browser wars" to Microsoft and soon disappeared. Yet, ever since -- Goldman's P-E ratio be damned -- big future profits seem to be all that matter.
SpaceX is the latest example. Though Musk's visions of giant rocket ships, orbiting AI data centers and Martian cities remain mostly aspirational, SpaceX is now the sixth most valuable U.S.-listed company with a market cap over $2.5 trillion.
The company even acknowledges in its prospectus, "We have a history of net losses and may not achieve profitability in the future."
And to get a piece of the rocket maker, investors must cede some traditional rights as owners, with Musk maintaining 85% voting power over the company using Ford II's Class B-stock maneuver.
Still, people are lining up for shares, just as they did in the past for the B&O, Ford and Netscape.
Some things never change. Among them: Goldman Sachs is in the middle again, netting a cool $100 million as co-lead underwriter for SpaceX.
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June 17, 2026 03:00 ET (07:00 GMT)
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