Elon Musk Becomes First Trillionaire as SpaceX Starts Trading
Elon Musk became the world's first trillionaire on Friday morning as SpaceX shares opened on the Nasdaq, crossing a threshold in wealth that no individual had reached before — not Rockefeller, not Carnegie, not the Saudi royal family at the peak of oil.
The number became real on June 12, 2026, when SPCX printed its first trade on the Nasdaq exchange and the arithmetic of Musk's combined holdings — SpaceX, Tesla, Starlink, xAI, and X — ticked past $1 trillion.
According to AP News, SpaceX shares opened at $150, an 11% premium over the $135 IPO price set on Thursday evening. Within minutes, the stock climbed to an intraday high of $168.75 before settling near $165 by midday — 22% above the offering price.
SpaceX's $75 Billion IPO Shatters Every Record
The numbers behind the debut are without precedent.
NPR reported that SpaceX raised $75 billion by selling more than 555 million shares at the $135 offer price — making it the largest IPO in history, eclipsing Saudi Aramco's $35.4 billion debut in 2019 by more than double.
By midday, SpaceX's market capitalisation had crossed $2 trillion, exceeding the $1.77 trillion target the company set when it priced the offering the night before.
CNBC reported that Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX's president and chief operating officer, led the ceremony at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York while Musk rang the opening bell remotely from the company's headquarters at Starbase, Texas, surrounded by hundreds of employees.
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What SpaceX Actually Looks Like as a Public Company
The $2 trillion valuation is not a conventional earnings story.
According to Fortune and AP, SpaceX generated $18.7 billion in revenue in 2025 while posting an operating loss of $2.6 billion. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, it lost a further $4.3 billion. Since Musk founded SpaceX in El Segundo, California in 2002 with $100 million from the PayPal sale, the company has accumulated a total deficit of $41.3 billion.
The offering was internally codenamed "Project Apex" and was backed by a syndicate of 21 banks, led by Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Citigroup.
Musk owns approximately 42% of SpaceX, according to research firm Pitchbook, and the public offering was structured as a dual-class share arrangement preserving his voting control.
SpaceX set aside roughly 30% of public shares for retail investors — far above the 5–10% typically reserved for individual buyers in mega-IPOs.
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The Bet Behind the Valuation
Morningstar pegged SpaceX's fair value near $780 billion — less than half the IPO target.
ARK Invest took the opposite view, projecting a valuation of up to $3.1 trillion by 2030, driven by Starlink's subscriber base of more than 9 million users and the long-term commercial potential of the Starship programme.
The gap between those two estimates reflects what investors are actually buying: not current earnings, but a position in what SpaceX might become across the next two decades — a Starlink satellite network, a Mars transit company, and now the public parent of both xAI and X.
Morningstar's caution and ARK's optimism exist simultaneously because SpaceX is priced as a futures bet, not a present-value calculation. It is, as one analyst put it, a wager on Musk's capacity to keep building things that work.
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Key Takeaways
- Elon Musk became the world's first trillionaire on June 12, 2026, as SpaceX began trading.
- SpaceX opened at $150/share, 11% above its $135 IPO price, hitting an intraday high of $168.75.
- The IPO raised $75 billion — the largest in history, more than double Saudi Aramco's 2019 record.
- SpaceX's market cap crossed $2 trillion by midday Friday.
- The company posted $18.7B in revenue in 2025 but carries a total accumulated deficit of $41.3 billion.
Sources
- AP News — Elon Musk, world's first trillionaire: SpaceX IPO
- NPR — SpaceX stock starts trading, rising above its IPO price
- CNBC — SpaceX IPO SPCX live updates
- Fortune / AP — Elon Musk, world's first trillionaire: one implication of the massive SpaceX IPO
- NBC News — SpaceX, largest IPO ever, set to begin trading today
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