SpaceX made its public stock market debut Friday on Wall Street, making CEO Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire.
Musk is already the world’s richest person. But after his company priced its blockbuster initial public offering at $135 a share and started trading publicly, the move boosted the technology mogul’s fortunes from an estimated $813 billion and sent SpaceX into the ranks of the world’s most valuable companies.
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Trading on the shares under the ticker symbol “SPCX” began just before noon, higher than expected, at $151.53 per share. Within minutes, shares rose to $168.33 and are now hovering around $164.
SpaceX executives rang in the opening bell at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York as Musk embraced trillionaire status.
“This is the best entrepreneur of our generation in Elon, and he’s going after two of the biggest markets of all time, and two of the most important markets in technology for our society — space and AI,” Andressen Horowitz’s David George told CNBC. “They can send a Starship, which is the size of a football field, effectively up to space, land it back on Earth with the chopsticks — no one else is close to being able to do that.”
Around 4,400 SpaceX workers were set to become millionaires when the stock began trading on Friday, according to the New York Times, after the company made the biggest initial public offering in history on Thursday.
Musk addressed the IPO from Starbase’s Texas headquarters, reflecting on how far the company has come.
“It is certainly hard to believe that a little company that started in a warehouse in El Segundo, [California], is now going public,” Musk said.
In the IPO, SpaceX sold 556 million shares at $135 a share, raising $75 billion. Those shares started being publicly traded the following day.
Musk owns about 42% of SpaceX, as well as 350 million stock options exercisable at $8.39 per share, according to the company’s IPO filing. The company accounts for 70% of Musk’s total net worth, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index. The next richest billionaire is former Google CEO Larry Page, with a net worth of $304 billion.
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During an interview last week, Musk said he was taking SpaceX public because he needed to raise capital to expand satellite systems and put AI data centers into space.
“We are embarking on a significant growth phase, like capital growth phase, where we’re are going to put in orbit, probably 100,000 satellites, probably over 100,000 satellites, just for communications,” he said. “The appetite for bandwidth of AI and robots is going to be enormous, and then we’re also doing the AI data centers in space, which is another massive capital endeavor, but I think it will be the primary means by which AI can be expanded.”
