Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, achieves trillionaire status with 23% increase in company's Wall Street debut.

Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, made history on Friday as the first-ever trillionaire when the company's shares soared 23% in their Wall Street debut. The shares opened at $150 and continued to rise, reaching $166.90 by 12:20 pm ET. This surge in price gave the company a market value of $2.18 trillion, and Forbes now estimates Musk's net worth at $1.1 trillion.

The success of the IPO was evident as institutional and retail investors eagerly bought 555.6 million shares of SpaceX at the offering price of $135 each. The company raised a whopping $75 billion, surpassing the previous record IPO set by oil giant Saudi Aramco in 2019. According to Musk, SpaceX decided to go public now in order to secure funding for its ambitious plans of establishing a colony on Mars and launching satellites and data centers into space.

In a symbolic gesture, Musk marked the opening of trading on Nasdaq, where the company's shares are traded under the symbol "SPCX," by ringing the ceremonial bell from Starbase, the company's home in South Texas. He reiterated his goal of making life multi-planetary and stated that SpaceX wants to take not just a few astronauts, but also regular people to the moon and Mars. Despite his reputation for making bold claims and missing deadlines, Musk was expected to reach the trillion-dollar mark due to his technology breakthroughs.

SpaceX may have incurred significant losses, but its ambitions are equally massive. In addition to establishing a one-million person colony on Mars, the company plans to launch data centers and outdo its rivals in the race for artificial intelligence. To achieve these goals, SpaceX requires billions of dollars in funding, far more than what it currently generates from its rocket and satellite business.

From the start of 2025 to March 31, 2026, the company reported a loss of $8.7 billion. While Wall Street bankers are enthusiastic about SpaceX and the hefty fees they will earn, not everyone believes the stock price is justified. Analysts at research firm Morningstar, who do not earn any investment banking fees, believe the IPO is "significantly overvalued" due to the company's unproven technology and massive capital needs.

They estimate SpaceX's true value to be only $780 billion, less than half of its IPO value. However, Musk is known for defying the odds and pulling off seemingly impossible feats. He became a billionaire on paper by creating two successful companies, Zip2 and PayPal, which he used to start SpaceX and invest in Tesla.

His companies have revolutionized the space and electric vehicle industries, and his wealth is tied to their success. Despite criticism for his recent pay package from Tesla and his involvement in controversial issues, Musk's fortune continues to grow. Since its IPO in 2010, Tesla has returned a staggering 20,000% to its shareholders, creating over $1.2 trillion in investor wealth.

This has helped lift Musk's pre-SpaceX IPO worth to $795 billion, according to Forbes magazine. SpaceX's IPO is the first of three "megacap" companies expected to go public this year, with Anthropic and OpenAI to follow. Nasdaq even revised its rules to allow SpaceX to gain entry into funds tied to its indexes in just 15 days, meaning investors will be able to buy the rocket maker's shares much sooner than expected.

However, not all investors are thrilled about the possibility of SpaceX being included in their index fund holdings. Officials from pension funds in California and New York have expressed concerns about the provisions in the IPO, such as the "super voting shares," mandatory arbitration of shareholder claims, and the amount of control Musk will have over the company. Despite these concerns, SpaceX's IPO has been a huge success and has solidified Musk's position as a trillionaire.