Today's Edition
(WASHINGTON POST)
Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire Friday after SpaceX shares surged on debut, following a record-breaking initial public offering with a more than $2 trillion value for the rocket company, which has grown to encompass artificial intelligence, internet, social media and national security.
Musk was expected to become a trillionaire if the stock price increased substantially from its IPO price of $135. On Friday just before 11.50am, SpaceX’s shares debuted at $150, an 11% increase from the IPO price.
Investors clamoured for shares, and the stock was trading at around $160 within minutes, exceeding $168 per share at one point.
|"Liftoff! First … trade complete,” SpaceX said in a post, marking the moment with a rocket emoji.
The stock market listing was highly anticipated, despite SpaceX’s history of losses, including $13 billion since the start of 2023.
SpaceX took its business public with an ambitious, even far-fetched slate of business goals, such as putting millions of satellites into space for data centres to power AI from orbit, and establishing a colony on Mars with 1 million inhabitants.
SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell was on-site for the opening of the market at Nasdaq’s bell-ringing in New York.
Earlier Friday, Musk issued remarks from the site of SpaceX’s headquarters at Starbase, Texas. "It is certainly hard to believe that a little company that started in a warehouse in El Segundo [in California] is now going public with the largest IPO ever,” Musk said.
"If people had told me this was going to happen, I was like, ‘Man, you must be smoking some really good crack because I think this company’s going to fail.’”
Musk’s stock in SpaceX was worth roughly $767 billion at the company’s opening stock price of $150. Together with his roughly $278 billion in Tesla stock, Musk has become the first trillionaire in history.
SpaceX was valued at about $2 trillion at the opening stock price Friday, excluding the value of stock compensation held by employees and others.
That stock market value would rank SpaceX in sixth place among the world’s most valuable companies, behind only Nvidia, Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence data.
During his remarks on Friday, Musk outlined his early vision for the company that would go on to debut on the stock market more than two decades later. "If there’s not a new company that enters space, we will never be a truly spacefaring civilisation,” he said.
