Elon Musk crossed a threshold no human being has ever reached on Friday, becoming the world’s first trillionaire after SpaceX made a spectacular entry onto the Nasdaq, raising $75 billion and pushing its market capitalisation past $2 trillion in a single trading session.
SpaceX shares, trading under the ticker SPCX, opened at $150 — already 11 percent above the IPO price of $135 — and surged past $176 at their intraday peak before settling around $161 at the close of regular trading. The stock finished the day roughly 20 percent above its offering price, a debut that smashed expectations even in a market where anticipation had been running high for months.
The bonanza vaulted Musk’s personal fortune to $1.2 trillion by mid-afternoon, according to Forbes real-time tracking. His SpaceX stake alone, at opening prices, was valued at more than $766 billion. Combined with his holding in Tesla, which added a further $280 billion, the arithmetic was unambiguous: Musk is now worth more than the entire gross domestic product of Taiwan, Ireland, or Sweden. He is also worth more than the next five wealthiest people on earth put together. The nearest competitor on the global rich list, Google co-founder Larry Page, sits at $296 billion — less than a quarter of Musk’s new net worth.
The IPO is the largest in history by the amount raised, surpassing Saudi Aramco’s 2019 debut and obliterating earlier projections that had pegged SpaceX’s fundraising target at $25 billion to $50 billion. The final figure of $75 billion reflects how dramatically investor appetite grew as the listing drew closer and the company’s ambitions became clearer. SpaceX had been valued in private markets at around $350 billion as recently as 2024; it is now a $2 trillion publicly traded company.
The listing also minted a new generation of wealthy insiders. Thousands of SpaceX employees who held stock options became millionaires on Friday, while several senior executives crossed into billionaire territory. For many of them, it was the payoff for years of work on programmes ranging from Falcon 9 and Starship to the Starlink satellite internet constellation, which now generates the majority of the company’s revenue.
Musk, who for years resisted taking SpaceX public — arguing that its long-horizon mission to colonise Mars was incompatible with the short-term pressures of public markets — eventually relented as the company’s scale made a listing increasingly logical. He has described SpaceX’s purpose as making science fiction a reality, and told investors the capital raised would go toward accelerating that mission, including Starship development and its ambitions for a permanent human presence on the Moon and Mars.
The milestone is not without its critics. Musk’s ascent to $1 trillion in personal wealth — accumulated across SpaceX, Tesla, xAI, and other ventures — is already reigniting fierce debate about wealth concentration, the influence of technology billionaires over public life, and what it means for democratic societies when a single individual commands more resources than most nations. His simultaneous role as a government advisor under the Trump administration has added a political dimension to that conversation that shows no sign of fading.
For now, however, Wall Street celebrated. Friday’s trading session was bookended by two extraordinary stories: a potential end to a 100-day war in the Middle East, and the birth of the world’s first trillionaire. On any other day, either would have dominated the news cycle entirely.
