SpaceX made its long-awaited public debut on the Nasdaq on Friday, with shares opening at $150—above the $135 IPO price—and surging roughly 30% by midday, according to TechCrunch. The rally vaulted SpaceX into the top six most valuable U.S. companies.
The windfall pushed Elon Musk into territory no individual has ever occupied. According to CNBC, his SpaceX stake alone is worth more than $766 billion; combined with his Tesla holdings, his net worth as of Friday stands at roughly $1.05 trillion. His wealth had been hovering around $800 billion before the listing, according to The Verge.
Musk is now officially the world's first trillionaire—a milestone Wired called "an unexplored frontier of wealth." The Verge noted that a trillion dollars is a thousand times more than a billion, a scale it called difficult to fathom even for the roughly 3,363 billionaires currently in existence.
The debut sparked a retail investor frenzy. Robinhood reported "record-breaking" traffic after SpaceX shares began trading, though the platform said some customers experienced intermittent disruptions that have since resolved, according to TechCrunch.
Long-term investors are bullish. Sequoia's Maguire compared SpaceX to Nvidia three years ago and said he plans to hold his shares "forever," per CNBC. Meanwhile, SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell declined to dismiss the possibility of a tie-up between SpaceX and Tesla, telling CNBC that such a deal "might make Elon's life a little easier."
The IPO is part of a broader wave: according to Yahoo Finance, SpaceX joins Anthropic and OpenAI in what is shaping up to be a blockbuster IPO summer for AI-adjacent companies. The New York Times reported the three deals could collectively mint around 20 new billionaires.
The story matters because it marks the first time in history that a single individual has crossed the trillion-dollar threshold, concentrating an almost incomprehensible level of economic power—spanning space, AI, and transportation—in one person's hands.