Walmart's 1970 IPO Turned $1,000 Into $38.9M: A Lesson for SpaceX (SPCXB) Buyers

$38.9 Million From a $4.95 Million Listing

Walmart's October 1970 public offering remains the most profitable IPO in United States history, and the mechanics behind that record carry a direct warning for anyone buying SpaceX (SPCXB) at today's scale. A $1,000 allocation at the offering price would be worth approximately $38.9 million now — a figure few would credit, given how small the raise was. Walmart sold 300,000 shares at $16.50 each, collecting just $4.95 million, a float so thin that early liquidity depended on market makers willing to quote a barely followed regional retailer. Nothing about the first decade suggested it would become the benchmark it is today.

SpaceX, by contrast, completed the largest IPO in US history this June, raising tens of billions shortly after its $60 billion Cursor deal. So how did a listing a fraction of the size produce a return measured in millions of percent? The answer is stock splits, which hand investors additional shares without changing the value of their position at the moment of the split. Walmart has split its stock 12 times since going public, and one share bought in 1970 has multiplied into 6,144 shares today. Fresh quantitative work argues that headline return tables systematically understate legacy winners: the analyst behind the study said quoted figures are wrong in the same direction every time, putting the true Walmart number closer to 3,885,000% and attributing the entire gap to twelve omitted splits. For SpaceX buyers the relevance is direct — the company priced its IPO at $135, opened at $150 and carries a valuation above $2 trillion, while neither it nor a possibly larger Anthropic offering this autumn has split anything yet. Compounding is the other half of the math: Walmart needed 56 years at roughly 21% annually, and even it fell almost 6% last week after a rare sales miss.

Nvidia's Earnings Rewrote a 56-Year Ranking

The same study, pegged to Nvidia's August 26 close of $209.66, ranked the chipmaker fifth among IPO survivors, with a $1,000 stake worth $8.39 million. That placement did not survive the week. Nvidia's second-quarter results showed revenue of $96.2 billion, up 106% year over year, while data center sales climbed 117%; the stock responded with an 8.7% gain.

Trading near $226 on Friday, NVDA lifted the same $1,000 IPO stake to roughly $9 million — enough to pass McDonald's and sit about $350,000 short of Home Depot. A 56-year ranking shifted inside one session, underlining how the AI buildout now moves legacy league tables, from data center procurement down to the retail AI trading bot phenomenon. The growth comparison favors Nvidia anyway: it compounds at roughly 39% a year against Walmart's 21%, though it went public just 14 months before the dot-com crash, in which the Nasdaq eventually lost nearly 80%. Holding through that kind of drawdown was the genuinely difficult part. Coca-Cola shows the split effect even more starkly — one share from its 1919 debut has become 9,216 shares across 11 splits, worth about $830,000 at current prices. The study's three limits matter too: decades of dividends from companies like Coca-Cola, McDonald's and Walmart are excluded, entry is assumed at an IPO price most retail investors cannot access, and only surviving winners are counted. For SPCXB watchers the Nvidia connection is concrete, since Nvidia holds a $21 billion SpaceX stake, tying chip earnings directly to the space company's balance sheet. Momentum gauges such as the RSI will likely track NVDA's post-earnings drift as closely as SPCXB's own tape. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Bitget.

What SPCXB Holders Should Price In

Our read at COINOTAG is that Walmart's record is less a celebration than a checklist for SPCXB holders. The company's investor-relations disclosure of its split history — the primary record behind the 6,144-for-one outcome — confirms all twelve splits, and no equivalent mechanism exists yet in SpaceX's share structure after its $2 trillion-plus debut. Josh Kushner's SPCXB-linked fortune, which has ridden the AI surge to a $16.7 billion net worth, shows how much capital is now exposed to that unanswered split question. Unlike a crypto IDO, IPO allocations favor institutions, and retail exposure — whether direct or through tokenized vehicles compared in our best crypto exchanges guide — should therefore be sized for decades, not quarters.