Elon Musk Becomes First Trillionaire After SpaceX IPO

Elon Musk has become the world’s first trillionaire after SpaceX had the biggest initial public offering in history.

SpaceX jumped on its Nasdaq debut, pushing its value past $2 trillion. Investors rushed to buy into Musk’s big business empire, which includes rockets, internet service and AI, after the record IPO.

The company’s stock rose 19 per cent and closed at $160.95, taking Musk’s net worth to about $1.1 trillion.

SpaceX’s IPO is more than double the size of Saudi Aramco’s $29.4 billion listing in 2019.

“It is hard to believe that a little company that started in a warehouse in El Segundo is going public in the largest IPO ever,” Musk told employees before the listing.

“I gave SpaceX less than a 10 per cent chance of succeeding at all.”

Space Exploration Technology, as it is officially known, gave the underwriting banks an overallotment option to buy an additional 83.3 million shares at the IPO price, the statement showed. Demand for the listing was more than four times the available shares.

Musk says the company is going public because it needs cash to support its plans for satellites and data centres in space, with the long-term goal of building a colony on Mars.

“We want to be able to take anyone who wants to go to the Moon, to Mars, or anywhere in the solar system – or maybe beyond the solar system at some point – we want to be able to take you there,” Musk said.

“Not just a few astronauts, I mean you, literally you – whoever you are watching this, SpaceX wants to take you to the Moon, to Mars, and ultimately beyond.”

Musk’s supporters in the retail trading community were a key part of the deal, placing more than $100 billion in orders for the stock, Bloomberg reported on Thursday.

At Starbase, where SpaceX launches its Starship rockets on the Texas border with Mexico, fans came from different places hoping to see Musk. Lesley Varin, from Washington state, covered her car with stuffed toys holding handwritten signs celebrating SpaceX. One said: “Congrats Elon, Big 1st!”

SpaceX is the first of three major IPOs expected to benefit from investor appetite for leading AI companies. Demand has helped US stock indexes reach record highs this year, even with higher inflation and the impact of the war in Iran.

Anthropic and OpenAI, two AI rivals of the company, are expected to go public this year and could aim for valuations above $1 trillion each. This means SpaceX stock will be watched closely by Silicon Valley investors and Wall Street traders.

The heavy flow of new public listings, along with an $85 billion equity offering from Alphabet and the chance that more big tech companies may follow, has raised concerns about whether investor demand will be enough to absorb the supply.

SpaceX’s acquisition of Musk’s xAI in February lifted the combined company’s private valuation to $1.25 trillion, with the original SpaceX value reaching $1 trillion. This was up from about $800 billion in an insider share sale in December, about double the level from July 2025.

At the IPO price of $135, SpaceX’s market value puts it among the top 10 public companies in the world and makes it bigger than another of Musk’s companies, Tesla.

The growth shows how SpaceX has changed over the past six months, moving from rocket launches and satellite broadband internet to an AI-focused business. Deals to provide computing infrastructure to Anthropic and Alphabet’s Google for as much as $2.17 billion a month are set to become SpaceX’s biggest source of revenue.

Musk’s plan to place SpaceX at the centre of a sci-fi future, with data centres in space and robot factories on the Moon, came at the right time to benefit from strong demand for AI-related investments.

Still, much of SpaceX’s plan to lead what the company sees as a $26.5 trillion total addressable market in AI depends on technology that does not yet exist or has not been tested at scale. The company also faces strong competition from Anthropic and OpenAI, whose chatbots have been more widely used by consumers and business customers than xAI’s Grok.

But even people who doubt the company’s current valuation have accepted Musk’s success in building Tesla and SpaceX into giants, and in making money for investors, helped by a loyal retail investor base.

Musk’s paper gains

Musk’s net worth jumped past $1.1 trillion with the IPO, making him the world’s first trillionaire.

His wealth could rise even more if he meets performance-based conditions for awards of up to 1.3 billion additional class B shares in total, split into tranches.

It would not be easy to earn all those shares. The company’s market capitalisation needs to reach $7.5 trillion, it must complete non-Earth-based data centres capable of delivering 100 terawatts of computing power a year, and it must build a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million residents.

Musk, who will not be able to sell any shares until a year after trading starts, controls 84 per cent of the voting power after the IPO, excluding the possible overallotment. SpaceX’s governance rules mean Musk is effectively able to choose the board members, which means only he can remove himself as chief executive.

The IPO is set to deliver gains for different backers, from venture capital firms to special purpose vehicle investors to members of US President Donald Trump’s administration.