For better or for worse, the world has its first trillionaire: Elon Musk.
On Friday (June 12), Musk’s rocket company SpaceX made its debut on the Nasdaq, marking the largest IPO in history. With a staggering $1.78 trillion dollar valuation, it made Musk the first-ever trillionaire during the first 20 minutes or so of trading.
And to mark the occasion, SpaceX’s giant Starship rocket was broadcast on the side of a skyscraper in New York City. On another skyscraper just to the left, Musk himself was featured.
What is it?
SpaceX’s tremendous IPO started trading at around $150 a share on opening day, ultimately closing that same day at $160.95 a share. It has since been a big topic of discussion among financial experts and amateur traders alike.
The 19.2% gain that SpaceX’s stock (trading under the ticker symbol SPCX) experienced on opening day took the company to a $2.1 trillion market capitalization, according to Yahoo Finance.
SpaceX, however, isn’t alone in getting past a trillion in market cap this year. Also according to Yahoo Finance, Walmart (WMT) did the same on Feb. 3, as did Micron Technology (MU) on May 26. Meanwhile, Apple (AAPL) was the first company ever to top a trillion in market cap, doing so in August of 2018.
Still, Musk is the first person to have a net worth above a trillion (though, to be clear, most of that money remains in his stock holdings).
Why is it noteworthy?
It’s fitting that Starship was the chosen vehicle to be broadcast in celebration of the SpaceX IPO instead of, perhaps, the company’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, which has sent astronauts to the International Space Station time and again.
Starship is analogous to the larger-than-life dreams of Musk, and it’s key to SpaceX’s future. Unlike the tried-and-trusted Falcon 9, the 408-foot-tall (124 meters) Starship is still in development. It’s being built to bring humans to the moon — no, the pun isn’t lost on me — and Mars someday. Settling Mars has been a longtime goal of Musk, with the entrepreneur even suggesting he’d like to die on the Red Planet one day.
SpaceX has been continually building and flying iterations of Starship while unafraid of failure, in keeping with the company’s philosophy. The idea is to find and fix issues via flight testing, a strategy that SpaceX thinks works well over the long haul. This method has led to some stunning images and also some environmental hazards. To illustrate his grandiose thinking, a few years ago, Musk said he hopes to send fleets of 1,000 Starships to Mars every 26 months. More recently, he said he hopes to put up to one million AI satellites in Earth orbit.
“It is certainly hard to believe that a little company that started in a warehouse in El Segundo is now going public with the largest IPO ever,” Musk said during an opening ceremony broadcast by Nasdaq on the day of the IPO. “I gave SpaceX less than a 10% chance of succeeding at all, to be clear.”