SpaceX just keeps shooting for the stars—and this year, its success has been stratospheric. The valuation of Elon Musk’s aerospace company has just surpassed $100 billion, according to a report from CNBC.
The company did not raise new capital, but rather crossed the threshold after a secondary sale of existing stock, the report says. That came through an agreement with new and existing investors, which allowed SpaceX to sell $755 million in stock from insiders at $560 a share, sources familiar with the deal told CNBC. The new share price is a 33% bump from its last valuation earlier this year, which had the company worth $74 billion with a share price of $419.
As such, SpaceX’s on-paper wealth has multiplied to a hundred times over the $1 billion unicorn mark, making it a “centicorn,” if you will. SpaceX is now the world’s second most-valuable privately held company, behind only China’s supermassive internet juggernaut Bytedance, according to data from business analytics firm CB Insights.
In recent years, SpaceX has raised billions to build a constellation of thousands of Starlink satellites, which supply broadband internet access to vast swaths of the planet, as well as the Starship rocket launch system. It’s currently jockeying with rival company Blue Origin over a NASA contract to create lunar landers for astronauts, and over turf in the emerging field of space tourism. But its meteoric rise also proves that perhaps—unlike some of its space race competitors this year (looking at you, Bezos and Branson)—it doesn’t need to ship a billionaire celebrity into orbit in order to make headlines.
But of course, we wouldn’t rule out a trip to the cosmos for the famously eccentric Elon Musk. After all, once you’ve become Earth’s richest man, founded a multitude of innovative ventures mapping everything from underground tunnel networks to the human brain, and wielded the power to sway stock markets by the billions with a single tweet, what’s left to conquer but the final frontier?
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