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The Morning

A Trillionaire?

SpaceX is expected to make Elon Musk even richer when its stock begins trading today.

Listen · 11:55 min

Good morning. Happy Friday. Let’s go to the stock market.

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ImageA graph showing SpaceX much higher than other plot points.
Note: Monetary values have been adjusted for inflation. Source: Dealogic.Credit...The New York Times

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.


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