At the opening bell on Friday, a few thousand SpaceX employees watched their stock options turn into houses. About 4,000 of them are millionaires now. Roughly 400 are worth more than $100 million each. [E8] Their boss did better: by the close, Forbes had Elon Musk at about $1.1 trillion, the first trillionaire anyone has counted. [E3]
The IPO was the largest in history, and it wasn't close. SpaceX priced at $135 a share and raised $75 billion. [E1] The stock opened at $150, finished its first day at $160.95 — up 19% — and left the company worth about $2.1 trillion. [E2] Orders ran past $250 billion for a $75 billion deal, which is the financial equivalent of a stampede. [E2] Nasdaq put a 120-foot Musk on a screen over Times Square, into a crowd that happened to be full of World Cup fans. One of them, asked about the richest debut ever, shrugged: it was "amazing to see what SpaceX is doing," he said, "but we're really here for the football." [E9]
Here's the thing nobody printed on the prospectus cover: you didn't buy a rocket company. You bought a satellite internet provider. Starlink made around $11 billion last year; the rocket program and a money-losing AI arm are along for the ride, and the AI arm lost more than $6 billion. The retail crowd that grabbed about a fifth of the shares [E5] is now helping pay for "orbital AI compute" — data centres in space, which do not yet exist.
They bought all of it without a vote that counts. Musk holds a special class of stock worth ten votes a share, so he controls about 84% of the company while owning about 42% of it. [E4] The board's main job is to supervise the one man who can fire the board. Put up the cash, sign away the steering wheel.
Not everyone threw confetti. Oxfam called the first trillionaire "a new pinnacle of oligarchy and a dark day for democracy." [E10] Musk rang the bell from Starbase and told the room that a little company "that started in a warehouse in El Segundo" was now the biggest IPO ever, there "to take the fiction out of science fiction." [E6] Then he undercut himself, the way he does: "I gave SpaceX less than a 10% chance of succeeding at all." [E7]
So what does $2.1 trillion buy? A real machine — 10 million Starlink customers, 9,600 satellites, most of the working sky — run by one shareholder and priced for a dream. The bull case is that the infrastructure is real and nobody else has it. The bear case is shorter: take away Mars, and you've paid a country's ransom for an internet company.