The opening bell on the Nasdaq exchange rang out to the sound of Elton John’s Rocket Man on Friday, as Elon Musk pressed the button to begin trading in his SpaceX company. By the close, he had become the world’s first trillionaire.
Shares in the rocket, telecommunications and artificial intelligence firm opened at $150 each, well above their pre-open price of $135, and quickly climbed to a high of $176.50 before closing at about $161. The surge valued SpaceX at more than $2tn on its first day of public trading, making it the biggest stock market debut in history.
“Elon Musk becomes world's first trillionaire as SpaceX shares surge on historic stock market debut.”
Musk’s 42% ownership stake in SpaceX is now worth $767.1bn, according to the Bloomberg rich list, pushing his total net worth to $1.11tn (£828bn) — a figure comparable to the entire economic output of Poland or Switzerland.
“It is certainly hard to believe that a little company that started in a warehouse in El Segundo is now going public with the largest IPO ever,” Musk said in an address at SpaceX’s headquarters on Friday morning. He reiterated the company’s mission to “make humanity multiplanetary” and “take the fiction out of science fiction”.
The listing turned hundreds of employees into millionaires, among them Tom Mueller, the company’s first employee and co-founder alongside Musk in 2002. “It is certainly hard to believe,” he told the BBC, reflecting on more than two decades of work.
But Musk’s newfound trillionaire status immediately reignited debate about wealth inequality. Democratic US senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were among a slew of politicians to condemn the milestone. Warren called it a “wake up call”, arguing it underlines the need for wealth taxes.
Musk, a hugely divisive figure in global politics, gave hundreds of millions of dollars to Donald Trump’s re-election campaign and for several months last year led the Department for Government Efficiency (Doge), where he was responsible for closing the US Agency for International Development — cuts that researchers in the Lancet medical journal warned could cause more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030. He has also clashed repeatedly with UK prime minister Sir Keir Starmer, including over the murder of 18-year-old British student Henry Nowak.
His wealth, however, exists largely on paper, tied up in stockholdings he cannot sell for at least a year. SpaceX’s president, Gwynne Shotwell, announced from the exchange building that the company had launched a Falcon 9 rocket on Friday morning carrying 29 Starlink satellites into orbit — a reminder that for Musk, the fiction of science fiction is becoming ever more real.