Elon Musk Just Became the World’s First Trillionaire, and SpaceX Hasn’t Even Finished Its First Trading Day

Elon Musk became the world's archetypal insubstantial trillionaire erstwhile Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ:SPCX) priced its grounds IPO astatine $135 Thursday night, and the cushion widened accelerated erstwhile shares started trading today. SpaceX priced its NASDAQ IPO astatine $135, opened astatine $150, and traded astatine $168.75 arsenic of 11:55 a.m. ET, up 25% from the connection and vaulting Musk past a threshold nary idiosyncratic has ever held.

How the Math Works

Per CBS News reporting connected the priced IPO, Musk holds astir 4.8 cardinal SpaceX shares (about a 42% economical stake) positive 350 cardinal options struck astatine $8.39. At the $135 IPO price, CBS valued his shares adjacent $648 cardinal and the options adjacent $44.3 billion. Forbes had pegged Musk astatine astir $813 cardinal pre-IPO, a fig that already embedded a $500 cardinal backstage SpaceX mark; the pricing lifted his involvement astir $192.3 cardinal supra that, pushing full nett worthy to astir $1.005 trillion earlier a azygous stock changed hands. Every dollar SPCX trades supra $135 adds astir $5.2 cardinal more. At the midday print, his luck sits person to $1.1 trillion.

The Offering Itself Broke Records

SpaceX sold 555.6 cardinal shares to rise $75 billion, surpassing Saudi Aramco's 2019 debut arsenic the largest IPO successful history. The $135 terms acceptable an archetypal valuation adjacent $1.77 trillion, and the first-day popular pushed the company's marketplace worth supra $2 trillion astatine midday, making SPCX the sixth-largest US nationalist institution down lone Nvidia, Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup, and JPMorgan led the underwriting, and retail investors got first-day entree done Schwab, Fidelity, SoFi, E*TRADE, and Robinhood.

Context and Caveats

Larry Page sits 2nd connected Forbes astatine astir $288 billion, little than a 3rd of Musk's caller total. Only 19 countries station GDP supra $1 trillion, per the World Bank, and The New York Times estimates astir 4,400 SpaceX employees could go millionaires. Oxfam's Nabil Ahmed called the milestone a "new Gilded Age" and "a caller pinnacle of oligarchy," noting Musk is present wealthier than the bottommost 46% of humanity, astir 3.8 cardinal people. Oxfam's math: hitting $1 trillion means Musk's wealthiness grew much than $550 cardinal implicit the past year, a gait supra $1 cardinal per minute.