Talk about a stellar debut. Rivian is the EV maker that is backed by Ford and Amazon.  Wednesday it had its much anticipated IPO, and let’s just say there were some expensive bottles of champagne being popped in bars near Wall Street. 

The company raised a cool $11.9 billion on its first day as a public company, which is the biggest IPO for an American company since an outfit that used to be called Facebook brought in $16 billion nine years ago. 

Some other impressive stats regarding the IPO; it’s the biggest in the entire world this year, and 12th largest ever. 

Shares of Rivian stock stated trading at $106.75, and ended the day up 29%. 

That valued the company at a staggering $86 billion, which is more than both Ford and GM. 

In fact, the only automakers valued higher than Rivian are Tesla, Toyota, Volkswagen and Daimler.  Those companies have been publicly traded more than one day. 

Electric vehicles are clearly all the rage.  In eight years or so, there could be 145 million EV’s around the world. 

Rivian is scheduled to deliver 100,00 vehicles to Amazon by the year 2025, as it will be used as a delivery vehicle by the online retail giant. 

Here’s something to pay attention to. A CNN story quoted the CEO of a research firm as saying the valuation of Rivian implies it will be producing a “ridiculous” amount of vehicles the next ten years. 1 million vehicles by 2029 to be specific.  

In comparison, Tesla started producing vehicles back in 2008, and they delivered under 500,000 cars in 2020. In other words, it took Tesla 12 years to produce the amount of electric cars that Rivian is supposed to double in eight years. 

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