The 10 Largest IPOs of All Time: Rankings, Performance & What's Next

For three decades, the biggest IPOs were rare, generational events.

That just changed: SpaceX's June 2026 debut raised $85.7 billion, more than 3x the previous record, and it's only the first name in a pipeline set to rewrite this entire list.

Before these records fall, it's worth asking what the biggest IPOs of the last 30 years actually got right and why a record-breaking raise so often says nothing about what happens next.

These Records Stood for Decades. 2026 Is About to Erase Them.

For more than 30 years, the largest IPOs in history were generational events.

A telecom giant, a state oil company, a Chinese eCommerce empire raised $15–25 billion and held records for years.

That era is ending. SpaceX's June 2026 listing raised $85.7 billion at an IPO price valuation near $1.77 trillion, more than 3x Aramco's long-standing record, and the largest IPO in history.

It's the first of a 2026 pipeline that includes Anthropic, Stripe, and OpenAI (reportedly weighing 2027), several eyeing valuations near or above $1 trillion.

A single year is already rewriting the all-time list.

Which is exactly why the history below matters. Before these records fall, here's what the biggest IPOs of the last three decades got right and what today's mega-listings can still learn from them.

Click here for the most anticipated IPOs of 2026.

The Largest IPOs of All Time, Ranked

These 5 companies raised more in a single offering than most businesses earn in decades, ranked below by capital raised.

1. SpaceX: The $85.7 Billion Debut That Shattered Every IPO Record

• IPO value: $85.7 billion (incl. greenshoe; $75 billion base)
• Shares sold: ~639 million Class A shares (555.6M base + 83.3M overallotment)
• Initial share price: $135
• Exchange: Nasdaq 
• Valuation at IPO: ~$1.77 trillion

In June 2026, SpaceX raised $85.7 billion on the Nasdaq, making it the largest IPO in history. It priced at a fixed $135 per share the night of June 11 and began trading June 12 under the ticker SPCX, initially raising $75 billion.

Underwriters Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley then exercised the deal's "greenshoe" overallotment, buying an extra 83.3 million shares to lift total proceeds to $85.7 billion.

The debut delivered. Shares opened at $150, climbed as high as $176.52 intraday, and closed their first day at $161.11, then rose ~19.6% the next session to $192.50, pushing the company's market value past $2.5 trillion and making Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire.

Demand was the story behind the greenshoe: the deal drew reported orders north of $250 billion, oversubscribed roughly 3.5-4x.

Following its February 2026 all-stock merger with xAI, SpaceX listed as an AI-and-infrastructure company as much as a launch business, reporting $18.67 billion in 2025 revenue against a $4.94 billion net loss.

Company Performance

Unlike the others on this list, SpaceX has only days of public-market history, so the verdict on whether it compounds is still entirely unwritten.

What the early sessions show is appetite. Demand was strong enough that underwriters exercised the full greenshoe, which is a controlled way to meet runaway demand and a signal of strength.

• Market cap: ~$2.5 trillion (June 2026), up from a ~$1.77 trillion IPO-price valuation, placing SpaceX among the most valuable companies in the U.S. within its first week.
• Profitability: A $4.94 billion net loss for 2025 on $18.67 billion in revenue, but the loss is a product of the February 2026 xAI merger
• Dividends: None. Like most high-growth tech listings, SpaceX is reinvesting into Starship development, Starlink expansion, and AI infrastructure rather than returning capital.
• Stock performance: Trading in the $160-195 range in its first week, against a $135 IPO price and a 52-week range that effectively begins at the offer price.

What SpaceX Got Right

• It opened the deal to retail. SpaceX reserved roughly 30% of the offering for individual investors, far above the typical 10%, broadening demand and turning the listing into a public event rather than an institutions-only allocation.
• It priced to pop. The fixed $135 price came in below some market expectations, leaving room for a ~19% first-day gain instead of risking a flat, Aramco-style debut. With the stock holding well above $135, underwriters exercised the greenshoe in full.
• It sold scarcity. A tight public float (around 4%) and a narrative built on Starlink's moat and AI-infrastructure ambition concentrated demand into a small pool of shares.

The caution worth keeping in mind is that a record raise marks a moment of strength but does not guarantee its future.

With losses accelerating, ~82% voting control concentrated in Musk, and governance concerns raised publicly before the bell, SpaceX is now the live test of whether the biggest IPO ever becomes one of the best.

2. Saudi Aramco: The $25.6 Billion Listing That Held the Record for Seven Years

• IPO value: $25.6 billion
• Shares sold: 3 billion (1.5% of total shares)
• Initial share price: SAR 32 ($8.53)
• Exchange: Tadawul (Saudi Stock Exchange)
• Valuation at IPO: $1.7 trillion

Until June 2026, the largest IPO of all time was Saudi Aramco, which raised $25.6 billion (up to $29.4 billion with the over-allotment) on Saudi Arabia's Tadawul exchange in December 2019.

But the headline number hides how close the deal came to disappointing.

Aramco originally floated the idea of raising up to $100 billion for 5% of the company, which would have valued it at $2 trillion. International investors balked, citing oil-price volatility, governance and legal risks, and geopolitical fallout including the Khashoggi affair.

Rather than force the issue, Riyadh scaled the deal back, listed just 1.5% of the company on its domestic Tadawul exchange, and leaned heavily on local and regional investors to get it done.

The result was a record-breaking raise at a $1.7 trillion valuation: short of the original ambition, but a success on the terms that mattered.

Crucially, the listing wasn't just about capital: it was the centerpiece of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's Vision 2030 plan to diversify the Saudi economy beyond oil.

Company Performance

Years later, Aramco remains one of the most valuable companies on earth.

Its fortunes rise and fall with global oil prices and OPEC+ production decisions rather than compounding like a tech stock.

• Market cap: 6.62T SAR (~$1.8 trillion) (2026), still one of the ten most valuable public companies in the world.
• Profitability: $104.7 billion net income for FY2025, more than Apple, Microsoft, and Alphabet typically earn in a year.
• Dividends: $85.5 billion distributed to shareholders in 2025, among the largest dividend payouts of any company in the world, and a 3.5% increase marking Aramco's fourth straight year of dividend growth.
• Stock performance: 27.90 SAR (~$7.44) as of late May 2026, trading near the top of its 52-week range and tracking OPEC+ production decisions closely.

What Aramco Got Right

Looking back, several patterns explain how the deal became the biggest in history despite the doubts surrounding it:

• It adjusted ambition to match real demand. Rather than chase the $100 billion headline and risk a failed listing, Aramco cut the deal to $25.6 billion and a 1.5% float.
• It listed where the appetite was. Facing international skepticism, Aramco leaned on its domestic Tadawul exchange and regional investors instead of forcing a foreign listing on unfavorable terms.
• It turned its strengths into the story. Positioning itself as essential to global energy stability, Aramco offset valuation and geopolitical doubts with its undeniable scale and centrality to world oil.

3. Alibaba: The $21.8 Billion Debut That Became the Largest US IPO Ever

• IPO value: $21.8 billion
• Shares sold: 368 million (14.9% of total shares)
• Initial share price: $68
• Exchange: New York Stock Exchange (NYSE)
• Valuation at IPO: Approximately $231 billion

In September 2014, Alibaba Group Holding Limited raised $21.8 billion on the NYSE. It was the largest IPO in history at the time and remains the largest IPO ever by a company listing in the United States, even though Alibaba is Chinese.

The debut was a spectacle. Shares priced at $68 opened at $92.70 and closed up 38% on day one, valuing the company at roughly $231 billion and briefly making founder Jack Ma the richest person in China.

But the bigger story was where Alibaba chose to list. Rather than go public in Hong Kong, its natural home market, Alibaba opted for New York.

This was partly because Hong Kong's rules wouldn't accommodate its partnership governance structure, and partly to tap the deeper, more liquid US capital markets.

Company Performance

The years since have been far bumpier than that opening day suggested.

Alibaba has moved through Beijing's regulatory crackdown, a record antitrust fine, and a broad restructuring. It’s now repositioning around AI and cloud rather than eCommerce alone.

• Market cap: $298 billion (May 2026), up modestly from its IPO valuation but well below its 2020 peak above $800 billion.
• Profitability: RMB 102.1 billion (~$14.8 billion) net income for the fiscal year ending March 2026.
• Dividends: Alibaba paid its first-ever dividend in 2024, with a current annual dividend near $1.05 per share.
• Stock performance: $124–126 per share in late May 2026, within a 52-week range of roughly $104–193.

What Alibaba Got Right

A few decisions explain why the listing became a landmark, and how Alibaba has stayed standing through a turbulent decade:

• It listed where its goals fit, not where it was expected to. Alibaba chose the NYSE over Hong Kong to accommodate its governance structure and tap deeper capital, maximizing global visibility.
• It reinvested before rewarding shareholders. For a decade Alibaba poured profits into logistics, expansion, and innovation rather than dividends, waiting until 2024 to start paying out.
• It diversified ahead of the pressure. As US–China tensions and domestic regulation mounted, Alibaba expanded beyond eCommerce into cloud and AI, building the second growth engine now carrying the stock.

4. SoftBank: The $21.3 Billion Spin-Off That Set Japan's IPO Record

• IPO value: ¥2.65 trillion (approximately $21.3 billion)
• Shares sold: More than 1.76 billion
• Initial share price: ¥1,500
• Exchange: Tokyo Stock Exchange
• Valuation at IPO: Approximately ¥7.18 trillion

In December 2018, SoftBank Group Corp. spun off its Japanese telecom unit, SoftBank Corp., in an IPO that raised $21.3 billion. It was the largest in Japan's history and, at the time, the biggest IPO anywhere since Alibaba in 2014.

This listing was overall a financing maneuver. Founder Masayoshi Son took the mature, cash-generating mobile unit public to free up capital for the parent company's real ambition: global technology investing through the Vision Fund.

The debut was rocky, with shares falling about 14.5% on day one. It was one of Japan's worst major-IPO openings, as retail investors questioned the price after an aggressive marketing push.

Yet the deal did exactly what Son needed: it converted a slow-growth telecom into a war chest for higher-risk bets.

Company Performance

The split produced two very different companies. The listed entity, SoftBank Corp., has settled into a stable, dividend-focused carrier, while its parent funnels capital into AI and frontier tech.

• Market cap: ~¥10.2–10.7 trillion (~$70 billion) as of May 2026, well above its IPO valuation, reflecting steady growth as a core Japanese carrier.
• Profitability: ¥11 earnings per share, positioning it as a mature, profitable operator rather than a high-growth play.
• Dividends: A dividend yield near 4%, sustained for eight consecutive years, among the more reliable payouts on the Tokyo exchange.
• Stock performance: ¥217 per share in late May 2026, up about 66% since its 2018 IPO once dividends are included.

SoftBank Group, continues to invest heavily in AI, including a multibillion-dollar commitment to Stargate, an AI-infrastructure venture with OpenAI and Oracle, the strategy the 2018 IPO was designed to fund.

What Softbank Got Right

The listing looked underwhelming on day one, but the logic behind it explains why it still set a record:

• It turned a mature asset into growth capital. SoftBank took its steady, cash-generating telecom public specifically to free up funds for higher-risk tech investing, rather than letting a slow-growth unit sit idle.
• It spread its bets across sectors. Through the Vision Fund, the capital flowed into AI, eCommerce, biotech, and fintech, reducing dependence on any single market or region.
• It played a long game through volatility. Despite a rocky debut and swings in quarterly results, SoftBank held to a multi-year technology-investment thesis rather than reacting to short-term market noise.

5. NTT DoCoMo: The $18.1 Billion Listing That Stood as the World's Largest for a Decade

• IPO value: Approximately $18.1 billion
• Shares sold: Roughly 1 million
• Initial share price: ¥3.9 million per share (pre-split)
• Exchange: Tokyo Stock Exchange
• Valuation at IPO: Approximately $366 billion

In October 1998, Japan's dominant mobile carrier, NTT DoCoMo, raised roughly $18.1 billion on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. This record stood as the largest IPO in the world for more than a decade.

The timing was everything. DoCoMo went public controlling about 57% of Japan's cellular market, just as mobile adoption was exploding.

The company was pioneering i-mode, the world's first mass-market mobile internet service. Investors were buying a clear market leader at the leading edge of new technology.

Company Performance

Unlike the other companies on this list, NTT DoCoMo no longer trades as an independent public company.

In 2020, parent company NTT bought out the remaining shares in a ~¥4.3 trillion (~$40 billion) deal and delisted DoCoMo from the Tokyo Stock Exchange in December 2020, absorbing it fully back into the group.

DoCoMo remains NTT's core consumer mobile and "smart life" business, and is expanding through acquisitions such as its 2025 purchase of a stake in CARTA Holdings.

What DoCoMo Got Right

DoCoMo's record raise and its eventual unwinding points to a few patterns worth noting:

• It listed at the peak of its market story. DoCoMo went public as the dominant carrier, at the height of the telecom boom. This maximized investor appetite while its leadership was unquestioned.
• It capitalized on being first. The IPO let DoCoMo monetize an early lead in mobile internet, converting market dominance into one of the largest pools of capital ever raised at the time.
• It shows that a record listing isn't permanent. DoCoMo's later loss of ground and return to private ownership is a reminder that the size of an IPO reflects a moment of strength, not a guarantee of lasting independence.

The Rest of the Top 10: Five More Record-Setting Listings

Beyond the top five, the rest of the list spans insurance, energy, tech, autos, and banking.

It’s a reminder that record-setting IPOs come from very different places, for very different reasons.

• Visa: $17.9 billion (2008, NYSE)
• AIA Group: $17.8 billion (2010, Hong Kong)
• ENEL: $16.6 billion (1999, Borsa Italiana)
• Facebook (Meta): $16 billion (2012, NASDAQ)
• General Motors: $15.8 billion (2010, NYSE)

6. Visa: $17.9 billion (2008, NYSE)

Visa's March 2008 IPO was the largest in U.S. history at the time and one of the most counterintuitive, launched six months before Lehman Brothers collapsed.

It worked because Visa doesn't lend money. While the banks around it were drowning in defaults, Visa collected a fee on every card swipe regardless of whether borrowers could repay.

Investors recognized a toll booth, not a balance sheet, and bought in despite the surrounding panic.

That structural advantage has compounded ever since. Visa's market cap has grown roughly 35x from its IPO-day value, with $20.1 billion in net income on $40 billion in revenue for fiscal 2025, one of the clearest examples on this list of a business model that outlasted the market it launched into.

7. AIA Group: $17.8 billion (2010, Hong Kong)

AIA's $17.8 billion listing was born from someone else's crisis. Its parent, the American insurer AIG, was selling assets to repay a 2008 financial-crisis bailout, and after a planned $35.5 billion sale to Prudential collapsed, it spun AIA off instead.

The Hong Kong debut is still the city's largest ever. It re-established AIA as an independent pan-Asian insurer, capitalizing on the region's fast-growing middle class.

The bet aged well: riding decades of Asian economic expansion, AIA has since grown into a roughly 849.9 B HKD (~$115 B) company and a dominant force in life insurance across the continent.

8. ENEL: $16.6 billion (1999, Borsa Italiana)

ENEL's $16.6 billion offering was less a startup story than a sale of state silver.

The Italian government floated roughly a third of its national power utility — Europe's largest IPO of the 1990s and the biggest privatization in Italian history — while keeping control, raising cash and inviting public investment without surrendering a strategic asset.

ENEL used its newfound market access to expand aggressively abroad and, later, to pivot hard into renewables. Today it remains one of Europe's largest power and clean-energy operators, serving tens of millions of customers across nearly 30 countries.

9. Facebook (Meta): $16 billion (2012, NASDAQ)

Facebook's $16.0 billion debut is famous for going wrong.

NASDAQ's systems glitched on launch day, trades were delayed and disputed, and the stock spent more than a year below its $38 offer price as investors questioned whether Facebook could make money on mobile. It could.

By building a mobile-first advertising machine, Facebook turned the most-mocked tech IPO of its era into one of the best-performing.

Parent company Meta Platforms is now worth around $1.52 trillion, proof that a disastrous opening day says almost nothing about the long run.

10. General Motors: $15.8 billion (2010, NYSE)

GM's $15.8 billion IPO was one of corporate history's great comebacks.

Just 16 months after a $49.5 billion taxpayer bailout and a Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the "new GM" returned to public markets, letting the U.S. Treasury begin selling down the roughly 61% stake it had taken to keep the automaker alive.

The relisting restored GM as a private-sector company, and taxpayers fully exited by late 2013. The road since has been bumpy due to recalls, an EV transition, and shifting demand. GM trades near a $75 billion market cap today.

Why a Record IPO Doesn't Guarantee Long-Term Success

It's tempting to read a list like this as a ranking of winners. It isn't.

The size of an IPO measures one thing: how much capital a company raised on a single day. That number says surprisingly little about what happens next.

The companies above make the point better than any theory could:

• SoftBank Corp. fell about 14.5% on its first day of trading, one of the worst major-IPO debuts in Japanese history.
• Facebook spent more than a year below its $38 offer price as investors doubted it could make money on mobile.

A record raise can also mark a peak rather than a beginning:

• NTT DoCoMo set a world record in 1998, then gradually lost ground in the smartphone era and was eventually taken private and delisted.
• Saudi Aramco holds the all-time record and remains hugely profitable, but its stock tracks oil prices and OPEC+ decisions rather than compounding the way a high-growth tech company does.

So what actually separates a great IPO from a merely large one? Not the headline figure, but what sits underneath it:

• A durable business model. Visa raised $17.9 billion during a financial crisis and thrived anyway, because it didn't carry credit risk. The model, not the timing, carried it.
• A reason to hold, not just to buy. The strongest performers gave investors something beyond the debut: Visa's compounding network, Aramco's consistent dividends, and Alibaba's eventual pivot to cloud and AI.
• Room to adapt. Markets, regulation, and technology all shift after the bell rings. The companies that endured (e.g., Alibaba through Beijing's crackdown, GM after bankruptcy) were the ones that could change.

For the new record-holder, SpaceX, the verdict simply isn’t in yet. SpaceX’s debut delivered a strong first week, but the questions that will determine whether it belongs with Visa and Facebook or with DoCoMo are still open.

It is simultaneously a profitable aerospace business, a money-losing AI lab, and a satellite internet provider with no real competitor, bundled together under a single person controlling more than 82% of the vote.

Investors who buy SPCX are making a bet on all three at once, with limited ability to influence any of them. The IPO was historic. Whether it was a beginning or a peak is a question that 2026's public markets are only starting to answer.

Largest IPOs of All Time: Final Thoughts

What unites these companies is a single moment when scale, story, and timing aligned well enough to pull in tens of billions of dollars at once.

That alignment is rare, and it's why genuinely enormous IPOs happen only a handful of times in a generation rather than every year.

The names and figures at the top of this list will almost certainly change, and soon. The forces that put them there — and the gap between raising money and lasting — won't.

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Largest IPOs of All Time FAQs

1. What was the biggest IPO of 2025?

Medical-supply giant Medline was the largest IPO of 2025, raising about $6.3 billion on the Nasdaq in December at a valuation near $37 billion.

It edged out a busy field that included AI-infrastructure firm CoreWeave ($1.5 billion, and the largest U.S. tech IPO since 2021), LNG exporter Venture Global ($1.75 billion), and buy-now-pay-later firm Klarna ($1.37 billion).

2. What's the difference between the amount raised and the IPO valuation?

These two figures are often confused. The amount raised is the cash a company actually collects by selling shares, which is what ranks IPOs. The valuation is the company's total market worth at its offer price, which is usually far larger because only a slice of the company is sold.

Saudi Aramco illustrates the gap perfectly: it raised $25.6 billion but was valued at about $1.7 trillion, because it floated just 1.5% of its shares.

3. Why don't more huge companies go public sooner?

Staying private lets companies raise large sums without public-market scrutiny, quarterly reporting pressure, or disclosure requirements. Deep private funding (from venture capital and sovereign funds) has let companies delay IPOs for years.

4. Which industries produce the biggest IPOs?

Technology, telecommunications, financial services, energy, and insurance account for most of the largest IPOs ever recorded.

These sectors tend to dominate because they operate at massive scale, generate significant cash flow, or sit at the center of long-term economic trends like digital transformation, global energy demand, and financial infrastructure growth.

5. Do the biggest IPOs make the best investments?

Not reliably. The size of a raise reflects how much capital a company collected on one day, not its future returns — Visa and Facebook compounded enormously, while others stagnated or were delisted. IPO size and long-term performance are largely unrelated.

6. What is the biggest IPO ever?

As of June 2026, SpaceX holds the record. Its Nasdaq debut raised $85.7 billion, at a valuation near $1.77 trillion, more than 3x Saudi Aramco's $25.6 billion, the prior record-holder.