Elon Musk becomes world’s first trillionaire as SpaceX soars in Wall Street debut

New York: Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire after shares of his rocket company, SpaceX, soared in Wall Street’s biggest initial public offering of stock.

Shares in SpaceX closed more than 19 per cent higher after opening for trading at noon on Friday (Saturday morning AEST), a sign that investors are looking past the billions the company is losing and instead betting that its massive investments in satellites, orbital data centres and artificial intelligence will pay off in the future.

SpaceX opened at $US150 ($213) a share, then rose to around $US168, before finishing the day just above $US161. That price gave the company a market value of $US2.1 trillion ($3 trillion), making it the sixth-largest public US company – larger even than its founder and CEO’s other big business, the electric vehicle maker Tesla.

Between his holdings in SpaceX and Tesla, where he is also CEO, Musk is now worth an estimated $US1.1 trillion, according to Forbes.

According to Forbes, Musk is worth more than the next four wealthiest people in the world, with Google co-founders Larry Page ($US295 billion) and Sergey Brin ($US272 billion), Amazon’s Jeff Bezos ($US247 billion) and Oracle’s Larry Ellison ($US228 billion) next on the rich list.

A trillion-dollar fortune – roughly equivalent to Switzerland’s gross domestic product – almost defies comprehension. Steve Cohen, who made $US3.4 billion last year as the world’s highest-earning hedge fund manager, would have to earn that amount for almost 300 years before reaching a trillion. Each of Musk’s 14 children would rank among the world’s 30 richest individuals if they inherited equal shares of his estate.

“We’re not talking about generational wealth,” said Dan Walter, an independent pay consultant. “We’re talking about infinite.”

Musk says SpaceX, founded in 2002, is going public now because it needs money to fund its ambitions of putting satellites and data centres in space and eventually establishing a colony of people on Mars.

He earlier marked the opening of trading on Nasdaq, where the company’s shares are trading under the symbol “SPCX,” by joining a ceremonial bell ringing from Starbase, the South Texas home of SpaceX.

He reiterated his lofty goals “to make life multiplanetary.”

“Not just a few astronauts, I mean literally you,” Musk said. “Whoever you are watching this, SpaceX wants to be able to take you to the moon, take you to Mars and ultimately beyond.”

Known for his technological breakthroughs, as well as wild claims and missed deadlines, Musk was able to whip up enthusiasm for the IPO despite SpaceX losing billions of dollars a year. Institutional and retail investors alike jumped at the opportunity to buy a piece of the company at $US135 per share before trading began. The $US75 billion in proceeds SpaceX raised easily topped the previous record IPO from oil giant Saudi Aramco in 2019.

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 centres 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 $US8.7 billion.

Wall Street bankers that helped take SpaceX public are enthusiastic about the company – and the big fees they will earn – but not everyone thinks the stock price is justified.

Analysts at research firm Morningstar, which doesn’t earn any investment banking fees, wrote that the IPO is “significantly overvalued” because of SpaceX’s unproven technology and massive capital needs.

They estimate the company is only worth $US780 billion – less than half its IPO value.

Still, Musk has pulled off the seemingly impossible before.

The now-trillionaire – on paper at least – made his fortune by creating two companies, Zip2 and PayPal, that netted him about $US200 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 realised 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 $US1.2 trillion in investor wealth.

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 will end 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.

AP, Bloomberg

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