Elon Musk becomes world’s 1st trillionaire after massive SpaceX IPO – National

SpaceX jumped as the rocket maker’s stock opened for trading Friday and soon after shot the market value up to more than US$2 trillion — which is enough to make CEO Elon Musk the first-ever trillionaire.

As of 2:50 p.m. Eastern time, the stock was up 26 per cent and worth roughly $170 compared to the initial price of $135.

Institutional and retail investors jumped at the opportunity to buy 555.6 million shares of SpaceX at the offering price of $135 apiece, making it the biggest IPO in history with proceeds of $75 billion.

Musk says the company is going public because it needs money to fund its ambitions of putting satellites and data centers in space and eventually establishing a colony of people on Mars.

Elon Musk may never colonize Mars as promised, but enough investors consider the SpaceX founder to be a sort of miracle man that they’ll help him reach another fantastic goal now that the rocket company has gone public.

Musk is known for his brilliant technology breakthroughs, as well as wild claims and missed deadlines, but investors placed bets on a company with losses as big as its ambitions. Ahead of the first trade in SpaceX, Forbes put Musk’s net worth at $982.6 billion.

In addition to establishing a one-million person Martian colony, the company has promised to save humanity by establishing other outposts in space, launch data centers the size of football fields into orbit and outdo rivals Anthropic and OpenAI in the race to make money from artificial intelligence.

To reach its goals, SpaceX needs billions more than it currently takes in from its rocket and satellite business. Between the start of 2025 and March 31, 2026, the company lost $8.7 billion.

Big institutional buyers and smaller-pocketed investors alike have indicated they are willing to take a chance, paying a high enough price for the 555.6 millions on offer to raise $75 billion. That will easily top the current title holder, Saudi Aramco, the oil giant that raised $26 billion in its 2019 initial offering.

Musk made his fortune by creating two companies, Zip2 and PayPal, that netted him about $200 million at sale. He used that money to start SpaceX and invest in Tesla, and defied the odds by creating a space company that figured out how to reuse rockets and a car company that made electric vehicles cool.

Musk has realized vast sums of wealth for himself, much of it in stock he has yet to cash in or grants for shares he’ll only receive if Tesla or SpaceX hit ambitious performance targets. His recent pay package from Tesla drew criticism from the Vatican. At Tesla, he’s worried shareholders by fighting with regulators or dividing his attention between multiple companies and last year by taking a role in the Trump administration.

But a rising stock price has cured all ills: Since it went public in 2010, Tesla has returned 20,000 per cent for shareholders, or more than $1.2 trillion in investor wealth. That helped lift Musk’s pre-SpaceX IPO worth to $795 billion, according to Forbes magazine.

SpaceX is the first of three “megacap” companies expected to go public this year, with Anthropic and OpenAI to follow. Nasdaq even revised its rules to allow SpaceX to gain entry into funds tied to its indexes in 15 days, which means investors ended up buying the rocket maker’s shares much earlier.

Not all investors are thrilled about SpaceX potentially showing up in their holdings of index funds. Officials from pension funds for firefighters, teachers and other workers in California and New York sent a letter to SpaceX last month decrying some of the provisions in its IPO, including the “super voting shares,” mandatory arbitration of shareholder claims instead of the possibility of lawsuits and how much power Musk will hold over the company.

– With files from Global’s Ariel Rabinovitch

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