Elon Musk should be facing a war crimes tribunal and high-level investigations into election interference, fraud and DOGE’s USAID cuts, which left millions dead. Instead, Musk is set to become the first trillionaire in history today. Today, SpaceX will go public, offering 555 million shares for sale. By the end of business, Musk will be a trillionaire, no doubt. Monstrous.
SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket-building, satellite-launching and artificial intelligence company, is set to go public today at $135 a share. The company plans to sell 555 million of them. That means SpaceX would raise around $75 billion, putting its valuation at $1.77 trillion, the largest I.P.O. in history.
It could make Musk the world’s first trillionaire. Or it could tank. Some analysts have argued that SpaceX is significantly overvalued. The market could decide that Musk’s an overpromiser and pass on the stock’s high price. (Remember his purchase of Twitter for $44 billion in 2022? The company, now known as X, saw its ad revenue decline by 65 percent last year. Musk folded it into his A.I. company, xAI. Which is now part of SpaceX.)
“It really does feel very much a ‘don’t look at the man behind the curtain’ situation,” one career investor told The Times.
Plenty of people will get rich anyway. One launch engineer who worked at the company for 12 years told The Times he’d earned more than 100,000 shares during his tenure. At $135 a pop, his SpaceX stock would be worth at least $13.5 million at some point today. Even if the price drops by half, he’d still have millions on paper. “The magnitude of this has been ridiculous,” he said.
Or look to Antonio Gracias, one of Musk’s staunchest friends and business allies. He and his private equity firm, Valor Equity Partners, have a $65 billion stake in SpaceX at its target I.P.O. valuation. If the stock soars, Gracias will instantly become one of the world’s richest human beings.
Even if you don’t like Musk, or believe in the high value of SpaceX, the stock is likely to end up in your 401(k), Mike Isaac and Maureen Farrell report. When the company was setting up its I.P.O., it said it wanted to be included in the nation’s top stock indexes — groupings of public companies that act as a barometer for the broader market — shortly after going public. That’s not how it usually works: “Most indexes, like the Nasdaq-100, do not add companies until at least a year after they go public to protect index funds — the widely used investment vehicles that track the indexes — from trading volatility. If SpaceX was included faster than normal, it would compel large index funds run by giants like Fidelity and Vanguard to buy millions of SpaceX shares practically overnight. While that could boost SpaceX’s share price, it could expose index fund investors to more risk.”
They fast-tracked SpaceX anyway. (Who wants to miss out on the largest I.P.O. in history?) That means a lot of index funds, which millions of us have in our retirement accounts and pension plans, will hold shares in the company fairly soon. And if the stock plunges? “It doesn’t feel like anybody is watching out for retail investors or the common person anymore,” one of those common persons told Mike and Maureen. “It feels like the system is rigged against us.”
“Some analysts have argued that SpaceX is significantly overvalued…” Ya think?? “It really does feel very much a ‘don’t look at the man behind the curtain’ situation…” As in, everyone knows this is a huge scam and that Musk should be facing trial at The Hague, but hey, a handful of people are going to get really rich from this, and don’t you want to jump on this bandwagon? The economy is being held together with duct tape and string at this point.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid, Cover Images.
