STARBASE, Texas - Here are some of news stories that have come out since SpaceX’s successful IPO last Friday. The company ended its first day of trading with a market value of around $2.1 trillion.
SEATTLE TIMES: Catapulted by the market debut of his rocket company SpaceX, Elon Musk is now the world’s first trillionaire. That level of wealth, all owned by just one person, was once unfathomable. Before Friday, the trillion-dollar mark was reserved for measures like the GDP (or staggering debt ) of a handful of major economies — and, in the last decade alone, the value of some of the biggest companies to ever trade on the stock market.
Musk’s new title arrives amid a wider acceleration for the richest of the rich. Year after year, his former (although now very distant) billionaires club has reaped a growing number of members — from tech titans to celebrities. All the while, more and more people worldwide are struggling to pay their everyday bills. Many have decried the arrival of the first trillionaire as the latest and most alarming example of that wealth gap. The number “one trillion” is hard in itself for the human mind to comprehend. One trillion dollars is a thousand times greater than $1 billion. And a million times more than $1 million.
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Realtor.com: According to some estimates, the IPO will create 4,000 new millionaires among SpaceX employees, from engineers to cafeteria workers, who hold employee stock options as part of their compensation. In the small town of Brownsville, TX, near SpaceX headquarters, real estate agents are preparing themselves for the gold rush. The median listing price in Brownsville is a paltry $290,000, which is down 7.9% year over year and far below the national median of $425,000.
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YAHOO FINANCE: The biggest initial public offering in history lived up to the hype. SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX) went public today, with shares selling at $135 each. With shares in high demand, the stock opened at $150 and continued climbing throughout the day, closing at $160.95. That's a gain of 19.2% from the IPO price set by Elon Musk's company and gives it a market cap of $2.1 trillion, making it the seventh-biggest publicly traded company in the world on Day One.
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WALL STREET JOURNAL: The rocket maker is now America’s sixth most valuable public company. SpaceX ended its first day of trading with a market value of around $2.1 trillion, making Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire. The company’s stock jumped above the initial offering price of $135 to end the day at $161.11. Some skeptics think SpaceX’s exorbitant valuation is much too high.
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CNN Business: Elon Musk has many people to thank for becoming the world’s first trillionaire — his companies’ engineers who produced technological breakthroughs, Wall Street investors who were eager to shower him with their dollars despite questionable financials, but most of all, American taxpayers and government policymakers. “There would not be (Tesla and SpaceX) if it weren’t for the government,” said Ross Gerber, CEO of investment firm Gerber Kawasaki and an early investor in Tesla. The federal government awarded SpaceX more than $500 million worth of grants in its early years. And that $500 million is just a fraction of what Tesla received from government grants, loans, contracts and regulatory policies. That’s not to say SpaceX’s success and Tesla’s roughly $1.5 trillion valuation are entirely due to federal spending, but both companies teetered as startups before receiving taxpayer subsidies.
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Before Juan Hernandez became a welder at SpaceX, he had never heard of the company. "It was just another contract job for me at the time," he told CBS News correspondent Jo Ling Kent in a broadcast exclusive interview. Now, just over 10 years later, that leap of faith is paying off following the company's $75 billion initial public offering. Hernandez, who now works at Jeff Bezos-owned rocket startup Blue Origin, has roughly 6,500 SpaceX shares. On Friday, SpaceX stock closed at $160.95, valuing his holdings at $1,046,175. SpaceX shares started trading on the Nasdaq late Friday morning under the ticker symbol SPCX, marking the long-awaited Wall Street debut of the rocket and satellite company. The stock offering also turned SpaceX founder Elon Musk into the world's first trillionaire.
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THE GUARDIAN: Elon Musk is now the world’s first trillionaire, after his SpaceX exploration and satellite company went public on the Nasdaq on Friday. With shares priced at $135 each, Musk’s aerospace and satellite maker soared to an overall market valuation of approximately $1.77tn – which raised Musk’s net worth (which had already hovered at the astronomical $813bn) into the $1tn stratosphere. What does this tell you about capitalism in this era? That it’s no longer based on economic principles as they’re taught in school – prices set by supply and demand. It’s now based on hype, connections and total, arbitrary control.
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INC.COM The New York Times estimates that the company has 22,000 employees, plus hundreds more who have left. Many of them were paid in part with equity rather than 100 percent cash, leaving them with shares that they will soon be able to liquidate amid sky-high demand from retail investors eager to get SpaceX exposure. The most highly rewarded of these employees will, of course, be Musk himself, who is set to become the world’s first trillionaire (at least on paper) following the public listing. But, citing data from the investment platform Hill.com, the Times estimates that around 4,400 other SpaceX employees will at least become millionaires—many of whom never expected to be so lucratively compensated when they first took their jobs at the rockets, satellites, and AI company. An upper echelon of 400 company affiliates will make $100 million or more.
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YAHOO FINANCE: The stock market has spent much of the past two years rewarding category leaders. Investors have poured capital into dominant companies with clear competitive advantages while becoming increasingly selective about everyone else. That trend was on full display Friday when SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX) completed the largest IPO in history, raising $75 billion at $135 per share and immediately reshaping both the space sector and broader market. The offering drew enormous demand. Institutional investors reportedly oversubscribed the IPO by four times, while retail investors submitted roughly $70 billion in orders. SpaceX opened at $150, climbed as high as $176.52 during its first trading session, and closed at $160.95. That gave the company a market capitalization of approximately $2.1 trillion, making it the eighth-largest publicly traded company.
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