History’s Biggest IPOs, and What Each One Was Really Selling
SpaceX now tops a very strange list of offerings — a country’s oil, a legal workaround, a bailout resold as a fresh start — and together they map the brutal truth of markets.
A.I. Disclosure: I use LLM technology to help with research, fact-checking, document summaries, editing, and rewrites. I’m trying to use it responsibly, but I’m learning as I go. You can read my full ethics disclosure here.
For seven years the record for the largest stock offering ever belonged to a national oil company owned by a royal family. On Friday, SpaceX nearly tripled it — $75 billion raised at a $1.75 trillion valuation. The all-time list now reads, top to bottom, like a short history of what the public has been tricked into funding. It doesn’t suggest that the markets have much wisdom to offer.
Here are the 10 biggest IPOs ever, and what each one was actually selling.
1. SpaceX (2026) — $75 billion. A company that loses billions a year, priced on a future that hasn’t arrived, with one man holding 82 percent of the vote. What that structure actually is, and the 1602 company it descends from, is in the companion piece I published this morning.
2. Saudi Aramco (2019) — $25.6 billion. A government selling a sliver of the family business. Saudi Arabia floated about 1.5 percent of its state oil company, and the shares went mostly to Saudi citizens and Gulf sovereign-wealth funds rather than to the international investors the roadshow had courted. The offering wasn’t really a bid for capital. It was a bid for legitimacy — an IPO run as an instrument of statecraft, with the kingdom valuing its own crown jewel at $1.7 trillion and daring the market to disagree.
3. Alibaba (2014) — $21.8 billion. The largest U.S. listing of its era sold something the buyers never actually owned. Chinese law barred foreigners from holding the operating company, so investors on the New York Stock Exchange bought stock in a shell company in the Cayman Islands that held contractual claims to Alibaba’s profits. The market funded a legal workaround and called it equity. Talk about vaporware: investors bought the exposure and never the thing itself.
4. SoftBank Corp (2018) — $21.3 billion. Japan’s biggest offering was a debt transfer dressed up as growth. The parent company, loaded with borrowings from its tech bets, spun its mobile unit onto the public to pay down what it owed. The stock fell about 14.5 percent on its first day — a reminder (ahem) that a blockbuster opening and a sound investment are not the same event.
5. NTT DoCoMo (1998) — $18.1 billion. A mobile carrier floated at the tail end of Japan’s stock bubble, the same bubble that in 1990 had briefly made its parent, NTT, the first company in the world worth more than $100 billion. The valuation was a monument to a moment, not to durable earnings, and the hangover lasted a decade.
6. Visa (2008) — $17.9 billion. Visa went public six months before Lehman Brothers collapsed, and it thrived through the wreckage anyway. It doesn’t take a market risk; it takes a cut of every transaction in any weather. Among a list crowded with bets on the future, it’s the rare one that sold the public shares in a reliably profitable business.
7. AIA Group (2010) — $17.8 billion. The Asian life-insurance arm of AIG, carved out and sold to the public to help repay the U.S. government bailout that had kept AIG alive after the 2008 crash. Taxpayers covered the rescue; then the public was invited to buy the salvage. The cleanup of the crisis was in a weird way the product being sold? I know, I don’t get it either.
8. Enel (1999) — $16.5 billion. Italy floated its state electricity company, and citizens lined up to buy shares of a utility their own government had built and owned on their behalf. Privatization, in one motion, sold the public a thing the public already had. Che cazzo?
9. Facebook (2012) — $16 billion. A debut so botched the Nasdaq’s systems failed at the open, and the stock spent a painful stretch below its offer price. Then the company got hammered for not having a mobile strategy, which spawned the doomscrolling era in which we now live. This was a classic version of what is now Big Tech’s standard share structure: dual classes of stock that locked control with the founders no matter how much equity the public bought — a governance design Musk has now taken to its limit.
10. General Motors (2010) — $15.8 billion. “Government Motors.” The federal government rescued GM with tens of billions in public money, steered it through bankruptcy, and then sold the public shares in the company it had just paid to save. The taxpayer funded the rescue and was offered the chance to buy in afterward, at market price.
Statecraft, legal fictions, debt offloads, bubble valuations, public bailouts turned back into IPOs — and one viable business. The list SpaceX just topped isn’t really a ranking of size. It’s a record of who got sold what pitch, and how long it lasted.
The machine underneath all of it was built exactly once, on a canal in Amsterdam, four hundred years ago. Here’s what it did the first time it ran.
Further Reading
From Saudi Aramco to Alibaba: World’s biggest IPOs — the Reuters factbox ranking every offering by deal size
How SpaceX’s Dream of a Record-Breaking IPO Stacks Up — Bloomberg on SpaceX against the top 100 listings since 2000
SpaceX sets the stage for a record $75 billion IPO — CNN Business on the offering
Biggest IPOs of All Time — Dealroom’s ranked list with deal sizes and dates