from American soil. Last year alone, SpaceX completed 165 orbital launches, a record for any single launch operator in history. Starlink connects more than 12 million subscribers across 164 countries, leveraging approximately 9,600 satellites in low Earth orbit, bringing high-speed internet to communities that no terrestrial infrastructure could serve. This is the largest public offering in the history of capital markets. As the home of innovation and the home of the innovation economy, NASDAQ is incredibly proud to be SpaceX's partner as it builds the physical and digital infrastructure of the future. Your mission is now backed by the financial engine of the public markets with access to every investor everywhere. Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team. We cannot wait to see what comes next. And now, please join me in welcoming SpaceX's president and chief operating officer, Gwynne Shotwell, for her opening remarks.
Good morning everybody. So excited to be here today. We make history again. History. I want everyone to know that we did open this morning in a rather exciting way. We launched Falcon 9 and launched Starlink satellites to orbit. So what company would do such a thing on the day that they open in the public market? SpaceX would, right. I am so proud of this team. This year we are 24 years old. Elon founded this company in 2002 initially to build rockets and spaceships that will take humans to Mars and even beyond. We've not quite gotten to Mars. We're almost at the moon. But let's just quickly run through the amazing things you guys have accomplished.
2008, six weeks after a failure of Flight 3 of Falcon 1, we got the first liquid-fueled rocket to orbit from a private company. Yay. Yay. By the way, I should have prefaced this with — everyone said we could never get to orbit. Check. But it was a little rocket. Then everyone said, 'Well, you can't get a real rocket to orbit.' Two years later, we got a real rocket to orbit. Falcon 9. Oh, well, you'll never get to the space station. Because that's what we really want to do, right? We want to take humans outside Earth, but you'll never get astronauts to the space station. Check. We did that, too. Doubters, right? Oh, you'll never fly Falcon 9 enough. You'll never get to production. 165 launches last year. Check. You'll never build a rocket large enough to take humans to the moon and Mars. We built one. And this year I believe we'll get to orbit with that vehicle and we'll recover the second stage. We've already recovered the first stage and re-flown it. So good on you all for that too. With the merger, the acquisition of xAI, as a group, the largest coherent gigawatt-class compute on the planet, which will help us truth-seek and understand. So congratulations to all of us for that.
So we're about 22,000 strong. I'm super proud that over half of us actually bought additional stock in this opening, totaling billions of dollars. So, thank you for that, too. But really the thank yous go to all of you for hanging in there, for keeping a straight spine as the doubters doubt, to achieve historic things every day, multiple times a week. Thank you, all of you, for doing this, and I hope today is a day that you feel great about and that you're celebrating. Take a moment now — the Falcon recovery team can't take a moment today, but everybody else can, and I hope Falcon recovery team can take a moment a little bit later. And also thank you to the families, the partners, the plus ones, the children, the brothers, the sisters, the parents that have lived through it, that have seen launch failures, that have seen AI compute go down, that have seen kind of the trials and tribulations of this incredibly difficult business. Thank you so much for hanging in there. I know I can't do this without my incredible partner and husband, too. He's been a great source of support for all the SpaceX team, and you are a huge part of this success too. So thank you for that.
I haven't mentioned Starlink and Starlink Mobile yet. We're probably connected through that. So incredible team to do that, connecting those that are unconnected, and I'm really excited about the future of that. In fact, as I was meeting literally almost a thousand people in person over the last two weeks and almost a hundred thousand through telecommunications, hopefully on Starlink, what was clear to me as I was talking about the future and they were asking questions about what we'd achieved and what we're going to achieve — what was clear to me is that we are just getting started. It might feel like a long haul, but it's going to be even more exciting going forward. So, I want to introduce my boss of 24 years, the chairman of this incredible company, the CEO of this incredible company, and the chief designer of this incredible company, Mr. Elon Musk, who is in Starbase, Texas, and he's celebrating there with four or five thousand people.
