Elon Musk Becomes World’s First Trillionaire as SpaceX Starts Trading

Mr. Musk’s net worth also reflects stock in his electric carmaker, Tesla, as well as ownership stakes in other ventures, including the brain implant company Neuralink and the tunneling firm the Boring Company.

Mr. Musk, 54, founded SpaceX in 2002, and has since revolutionized the space industry with partly-reusable rockets and with Starlink, a satellite internet offering that provides service to rural areas, airlines and the Ukrainian army. Earlier this year, SpaceX acquired xAI, Mr. Musk’s A.I. start-up, which has built massive data centers, created a chatbot called Grok and also owns X, the social media company formerly known as Twitter.

Mr. Musk separately runs the electric car manufacturer Tesla and a handful of other start-ups.

SpaceX could pave the way for other enormous debuts, including by the A.I. companies Anthropic and OpenAI, which both filed confidentially for I.P.O.s this month. Both of those start-ups have valuations approaching $1 trillion. The three offerings could unleash an avalanche of wealth across Silicon Valley and Wall Street, creating new corporate titans in the process.

Earlier this year, Cerebras, an A.I. chip maker, kicked off the expected wave of offerings and rose 68 percent on its first day of trading, becoming the largest public offering so far this year and the biggest of any technology firm since 2019.

Here’s what to know:

• SpaceX’s business: While investors have so far leaped at the opportunity to purchase a piece of SpaceX, the company is still a money-losing venture. It lost more than $4.9 billion last year, compared with a $791 million profit in 2024, because of increased expenditures on A.I., according to its I.P.O. prospectus. Revenue was $18.7 billion last year, up 33 percent from the previous year.

• Earlier than expected: So far today, SpaceX and its team of bankers are running ahead of projections. It typically takes until early afternoon for the stocks of large newly public companies to start trading. Cerebras went public last month and started trading around 1 p.m. For the largest I.P.O. ever, SpaceX got a relatively early start by kicking off trading before noon.

• First trades: SpaceX’s stock price could swing higher and lower today, and maybe for the next few months. Relatively few shares are trading, and a lot of investors are looking to buy, likely driving the price higher. As more stock becomes available to trade in coming days, either from current investors selling after the price rises or from insiders who are prevented from selling their stock on Day 1, the price is likely to fall again.

• The Magnificent 7: All of the behemoth tech stocks — Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Tesla and Nvidia — rose on their first day of trading after their own I.P.O.s. Meta in 2012 had the most muted performance, rising just 1 percent before falling more than 30 percent over the next 12 months. Nvidia had the best debut in 1999, rising over 60 percent, extending that rally to a rise of 273 percent over the next year.