Hundreds of companies raised a combined $70 billion by selling shares to the public in the United States last year.

But 2026 could shatter records, with rocket and AI company SpaceX, ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and AI startup Anthropic all potentially making their stock market debuts.

So what exactly does it take for a company to “go public”? The process, known as an initial public offering or IPO, typically takes months or years and can cost millions of dollars.

The first big decision is where to list.

In the U.S., two options dominate: the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), the oldest and most famous, with its iconic trading floor in lower Manhattan, and the Nasdaq, a fully electronic exchange that is home to most of the biggest tech companies.

Together, they account for roughly half of the total value of all stocks traded worldwide.

Companies also have to pick a “ticker”: the short letter code that identifies their stock.

Some keep it simple (MSFT for Microsoft), while others get creative (DNUT for Krispy Kreme donuts, CAR for rental company Avis).

Before a company can sell shares to the public, it has to file a detailed document called an S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the U.S. government agency that oversees financial markets, and Wall Street’s de facto referee.

The S-1 is essentially a deep dive into the company’s finances, business model and risks, designed to help ordinary investors make informed decisions.

As JPMorgan puts it, it has “the dual purpose of registering the securities with the SEC and educating investors on the opportunity.”

The SEC reviews the filing and can ask lots of questions.

“For an S-1 filing, that can sometimes go through several rounds of comments from staff, so it could take months,” SEC Chairman Paul Atkins said recently.

He added that the agency is working to speed things up.

SpaceX is expected to file its S-1 this week, according to a source close to the matter.

Once the paperwork is underway, company executives hit the road, literally. They travel city to city (and hop on video calls) in what is known as a “roadshow,” pitching their company to big institutional investors like pension funds and hedge funds, as well as everyday retail investors.

SpaceX is planning a special event for 1,500 individual investors in June, according to CNBC.

Not every company makes it through this stage. Fintech firm Clear Street pulled the plug on its IPO plans in February after failing to drum up enough interest, blaming market volatility.

The trickiest part may be settling on a share price: the cost of one piece of ownership in the company when it first hits the market.

“Pricing an IPO is probably more art than science,” said Matthew Kenney, IPO specialist at Renaissance Capital.

Banks advising the company want to raise as much money as possible, but they also need to leave room for the stock to rise once trading begins; otherwise, no one will want to buy it.

“If you really seek to maximize the share price, you’re going to have very little aftermarket demand and the IPO can flop and nobody wants to be ringing the opening bell and see their stock price fall,” Kenney said.

Sometimes companies get it wrong and have to adjust.

Chip startup Cerebras revised its target price twice before finally going public at $185 a share, then watched the stock soar 68% on its very first day of trading.

Published – May 18, 2026 10:23 am IST

SpaceX’s Starship rocket is pictured after launching as seen from South Padre Island near Brownsville, Texas, U.S. on January 16, 2025.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

SpaceX launched its Starship rocket on its latest test flight Thursday (January 16, 2025), but the spacecraft was destroyed following a thrilling booster catch back at the pad.

Elon Musk’s company said Starship broke apart — what it called a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.” The spacecraft’s six engines appeared to shut down one by one during ascent, with contact lost just 8 1/2 minutes into the flight.

The spacecraft — a new and upgraded model making its debut — was supposed to soar across the Gulf of Mexico from Texas on a near loop around the world similar to previous test flights. SpaceX had packed it with 10 dummy satellites for practice at releasing them.

A minute before the loss, SpaceX used the launch tower’s giant mechanical arms to catch the returning booster, a feat achieved only once before. The descending booster hovered over the launch pad before being gripped by the pair of arms dubbed chopsticks.

The thrill of the catch quickly turned into disappointment for not only the company, but the crowds gathered along the southern tip of Texas.

“It was great to see a booster come down, but we are obviously bummed out about ship,” said SpaceX spokesman Dan Huot, adding it would take time to analyze the data and figure out what happened. “It’s a flight test. It’s an experimental vehicle.”

The last data received from the spacecraft indicated an altitude of 90 miles (146 kilometers) and a velocity of 13,245 mph (21,317 kph).

The 400-foot (123-meter) rocket had thundered away in late afternoon from Boca Chica Beach near the Mexican border. The late hour ensured a daylight entry halfway around the world in the Indian Ocean. But the shiny retro-looking spacecraft never got nearly that far.

SpaceX had made improvements to the spacecraft for the latest demo and added a fleet of satellite mockups. The test satellites were the same size as SpaceX’s Starlink internet satellites and, like the spacecraft, were meant to be destroyed upon entry.

Musk plans to launch actual Starlinks on Starships before moving on to other satellites and, eventually, crews.

It was the seventh test flight for the world’s biggest and most powerful rocket. NASA has reserved a pair of Starships to land astronauts on the moon later this decade. Musk’s goal is Mars.

Hours earlier in Florida, another billionaire’s rocket company — Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin — launched the newest supersized rocket, New Glenn. The rocket reached orbit on its first flight, successfully placing an experimental satellite thousands of miles above Earth. But the first-stage booster was destroyed, missing its targeted landing on a floating platform in the Atlantic.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is preparing to launch a tender offer in December to sell existing shares at a price of $135 per share, the Financial Times reported on Friday, citing people with knowledge of the discussions.

The tender offer would value SpaceX at more than $250 billion, according to the report.

SpaceX did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, is expected to wield significant influence in Washington to secure favorable government treatment for his companies, including SpaceX, after Donald Trump’s victory for a second presidency.

Elon Musk’s dream of transporting humans to Mars could also become a bigger national priority under Donald Trump, Reuters reported earlier this month.

NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to use SpaceX’s Starship rocket to put humans on the moon as a proving ground for later Mars missions, is expected to focus more on the Red Planet under Donald Trump and target uncrewed missions there this decade.

Under Donald Trump, SpaceX is also expected to push for even softer regulations on worker safety and safety of participants in private space flights in orbit.

A Reuters investigation last year documented at least 600 worker injuries at SpaceX facilities across the U.S., and how SpaceX disregarded safety regulations and standard practices.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

United States:

SpaceX successfully “caught” the first-stage booster of its Starship megarocket Sunday as it returned to the launch pad after a test flight, a world first in the company’s quest for rapid reusability.

The “super heavy booster” had blasted off attached to the Starship rocket minutes earlier, then made a picture-perfect controlled return to the same pad in Texas, where a pair of huge mechanical “chopsticks” reached out from the launch tower to bring the slowly descending booster to a halt, according to a livestream from Elon Musk’s SpaceX company.

“Folks, this is a day for the engineering history books,” a SpaceX spokesperson said in a voiceover on the company’s livestream, after the booster was safely in the tower’s grasp and company staffers had erupted in cheers.

“The tower has caught the rocket!!” SpaceX founder Musk posted on X.

Booster starts in top right corner. Watch to the end. Sound on pic.twitter.com/jS70tHLNcr

— (@kimbal) October 13, 2024

Liftoff occurred at 7:25 am (1225 GMT) in clear weather. While the booster returned to the launchpad, the upper stage of Starship was due to splash down in the Indian Ocean within the hour.

During its last flight in June, SpaceX achieved its first successful splashdown with Starship, a prototype spaceship that Musk hopes will one day carry humans to Mars.

NASA is also keenly awaiting a modified version of Starship to act as a lander vehicle for crewed flights to the Moon under the Artemis program later this decade.

SpaceX said its engineers have “spent years preparing and months testing for the booster catch attempt, with technicians pouring tens of thousands of hours into building the infrastructure to maximize our chances for success.”

Teams were monitoring to ensure “thousands” of criteria were met both on the vehicle and at the tower before any attempt to return the Super Heavy booster.

Had the conditions not been satisfied, the booster would have been redirected for a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, as in previous tests.

Instead, having been given the green light, the returning booster decelerated from supersonic speeds and the powerful “chopstick arms” embraced it.

‘Fail fast, learn fast’

The large mechanical arms, called “Mechazilla” by Musk, have generated considerable excitement among space enthusiasts.

Starship stands 397 feet (121 meters) tall with both stages combined — about 90 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty.

Its Super Heavy booster, which is 233 feet tall, produces 16.7 million pounds (74.3 Meganewtons) of thrust, about twice as powerful as the Saturn V rockets used during the Apollo missions.

SpaceX’s “fail fast, learn fast” strategy of rapid iterative testing, even when its rockets blow up spectacularly, has ultimately accelerated development and contributed to the company’s success.

Founded only in 2002, it quickly leapfrogged aerospace industry giants and is now the world leader in orbital launches, besides providing the only US spaceship currently certified to carry astronauts.

It has also created the world’s biggest internet satellite constellation — invaluable in disaster and war zones.

But its founding vision of making humanity a multiplanetary species is increasingly at risk of being overshadowed by Musk’s embrace of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his alignment with right-wing politics.

In recent weeks, the company has openly sparred with the Federal Aviation Administration over launch licensing and alleged violations, with Musk accusing the agency of overreach and calling for its chief, Michael Whitaker, to resign.

“He’s trying to position himself for minimal regulatory interference with SpaceX once Donald Trump becomes president,” said Mark Hass, a marketing expert and professor at Arizona State University. “But it’s a calculated gamble if things go the other way.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

This image made from a SpaceX video shows the crew of the first private spacewalk led by tech billionaire Jared Isaacman inside the capsule, Thursday Sept. 12, 2024.
| Photo Credit: SpaceX via AP

A billionaire spacewalker returned to Earth with his crew on Sunday, ending a five-day trip that lifted them higher than anyone has travelled since NASA’s moonwalkers.

SpaceX’s capsule splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico near Florida’s Dry Tortugas in the predawn darkness, carrying tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, two SpaceX engineers and a former Air Force Thunderbird pilot.

They pulled off the first private spacewalk while orbiting nearly 460 miles (740 kilometers) above Earth, higher than the International Space Station and Hubble Space Telescope. Their spacecraft hit a peak altitude of 875 miles (1,408 kilometers) following Tuesday’s liftoff.

Isaacman became only the 264th person to perform a spacewalk since the former Soviet Union scored the first in 1965, and SpaceX’s Sarah Gillis the 265th. Until now, all spacewalks were done by professional astronauts.

“We are mission complete,” Isaacman radioed as the capsule bobbed in the water, awaiting the recovery team. Within an hour, all four were out of their spacecraft, pumping their fists with joy as they emerged onto the ship’s deck.

It was the first time SpaceX aimed for a splashdown near the Dry Tortugas, a cluster of islands 70 miles (113 kilometers) west of Key West. To celebrate the new location, SpaceX employees brought a big, green turtle balloon to Mission Control at company headquarters in Hawthorne, California. The company usually targets closer to the Florida coast, but two weeks of poor weather forecasts prompted SpaceX to look elsewhere.

During Thursday’s commercial spacewalk, the Dragon capsule’s hatch was open barely a half-hour. Isaacman emerged only up to his waist to briefly test SpaceX’s brand new spacesuit followed by Gillis, who was knee high as she flexed her arms and legs for several minutes. Gillis, a classically trained violinist, also held a performance in orbit earlier in the week.

The spacewalk lasted less than two hours, considerably shorter than those at the International Space Station. Most of that time was needed to depressurise the entire capsule and then restore the cabin air. Even SpaceX’s Anna Menon and Scott “Kidd” Poteet, who remained strapped in, wore spacesuits.

SpaceX considers the brief exercise a starting point to test spacesuit technology for future, longer missions to Mars.

This was Isaacman’s second chartered flight with SpaceX, with two more still ahead under his personally financed space exploration program named Polaris after the North Star. He paid an undisclosed sum for his first spaceflight in 2021, taking along contest winners and a pediatric cancer survivor while raising more than $250 million for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

For the just completed so-called Polaris Dawn mission, the founder and CEO of the Shift4 credit card-processing company shared the cost with SpaceX. Isaacman won’t divulge how much he spent.

File photo of Twitter and SpaceX owner Elon Musk
| Photo Credit: Reuters

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tapped the rocket maker for a $1 billion loan around the time he was acquiring social media company Twitter, now known as X, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.

SpaceX approved the loan, which was backed by some of his SpaceX stock, in October, and Mr. Musk drew all of it down the same month, the newspaper said, citing documents reviewed by it.

Mr. Musk paid back the $1 billion with interest to SpaceX in November, the WSJ report said, adding that the reason for the loan could not be determined.

SpaceX and the social media platform X did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Last year, Musk closed the $44 billion deal to take Twitter private and took ownership of the social media platform by firing top executives immediately.