Musk and Space X

 

Who Wants to Be a Trillionaire?

The SpaceX IPO is a credit to Elon Musk and American capitalism.

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By 

The Editorial Board

June 12, 2026 5:43 pm ET

1309

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A live feed shows SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on the day of SpaceX's initial public offering (IPO) at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York City on Friday. Jeenah Moon/Reuters

Shares in SpaceX skyrocketed following its record $75 billion initial public offering on Friday, apparently making Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire—at least on paper. In our political age of envy, the press and Democrats are preoccupied by his otherworldly wealth. But deserving more attention is how he has enriched the country by building a remarkable company.

At the close of trading on Friday, SpaceX boasted a $2.1 trillion—yes, trillion—market valuation. The company raised $75 billion in its public debut, nearly three times more than the previous largest IPO (Saudi Aramco in 2019). It will need that money and multiples more to achieve Mr. Musk’s ambition of colonizing Mars and mining asteroids.

If the IPO had happened in China, the press would be mourning America’s economic decline. Instead, they are lamenting Mr. Musk’s riches. “Elon Musk is the world’s first trillionaire,” Bloomberg News writes. “He could theoretically do a lot with all that money—like fund 68 US election cycles or buy every carmaker in the US, Europe and Japan.” The grievance mood is strong these days at Bloomberg and most of the rest of the financial press.

Mr. Musk’s wealth largely consists of shares in SpaceX and Tesla. Their current stratospheric values could crash if the companies fail or investors lose faith in Mr. Musk. And mom and pop investors should know the risks in buying SpaceX shares. In any event, Mr. Musk’s wealth is a tribute to U.S. entrepreneurship and innovation, which are byproducts of its free-market system.

Mr. Musk, an immigrant from South Africa, launched the rocket company in 2002 with money he made from his PayPal startup. “It is certainly hard to believe that little company that started in a warehouse in El Segundo is now going public with the largest IPO ever,” he said Friday. SpaceX faced many early setbacks. Its Falcon 1 failed three times before reaching orbit in 2008.

A few months later, NASA awarded SpaceX a contract to supply the International Space Station. SpaceX later developed reusable rockets that greatly reduce launch costs, which the Chinese are still trying to achieve. Its success, which came through trial and failure, has ended U.S. reliance on Russia to transport astronauts to the space station and launch American satellites. The company is the leading edge of what could be the space economy.

In 2015 SpaceX launched Starlink, an internet satellite company that has helped Ukraine resist Russia’s invasion and dissidents living under authoritarian regimes like Iran to communicate. Mr. Musk this year merged his social-media company X.com and xAI startup with SpaceX, providing them with a vehicle to go public.

SpaceX has created thousands of jobs in working-class communities where it operates. That includes Hawthorne, Calif., Bastrop and McGregor in Texas, Memphis, Tenn., and Southaven, Miss. Its workers—including hourly blue-collar workers—receive stock options, which has allowed them to share in the company’s success.

By one estimate, the IPO has made millionaires of 4,400 SpaceX current and former employees, including 400 who hold shares worth more than $100 million. If you listen to union leaders and progressives, billionaires get rich by exploiting workers. SpaceX couldn’t succeed without its workers—as it notes in its IPO prospectus—and they would leave if they felt abused.

The IPO is giving workers and retail investors a chance to share in any future growth. It’s also allowing venture investors to cash out and pour their windfalls into new startups working on innovations that could improve and even save lives—e.g., cancer vaccines. Who knows which of these companies could someday be worth a trillion dollars?

With their envy of success and wealth, our political class ignores that financial rewards are what spur investors and entrepreneurs to take risks on companies that make all Americans better off. You don’t have to like Mr. Musk to appreciate what he has built.

Race

@multiplanet1

Elon Musk got rejected by Netscape. He walked into the lobby, was too shy to talk to anyone, and walked out. Never got the job. At his first company Zip2, the board demoted him. Twice. They refused to let him be CEO. He got fired from PayPal as CEO while flying to his own honeymoon. The board voted him out mid air. He almost died of malaria in 2000. Ten days in intensive care. Lost 45 pounds. A day from death. His first child died at 10 weeks old. His first rocket exploded. Falcon 1, flight one. Burned on the pad. His second rocket exploded. His third rocket exploded. The last of his money was nearly gone. Tesla nearly went bankrupt in 2008. The closest he ever came to a nervous breakdown. Both companies almost died on the same Christmas Eve. He was sued by investors. Mocked by the people who built cars before him. His childhood heroes, the astronauts who inspired him, testified against his company to Congress. The Cybertruck window shattered on live stage in front of the world. He overpaid for Twitter by his own admission and watched its value collapse. He was beaten unconscious as a child and thrown down a flight of stairs. He has said he goes to sleep alone and it kills him. He failed in public, over and over, for thirty years. He is the richest man in the history of the world. The difference was never the absence of failure. It was the refusal to stop after it.

Dustin

@r0ck3t23

November 2023. The most powerful companies on Earth lined up to make him kneel. Disney. Apple. IBM. Comcast. They pulled their money and waited for the apology. The whole press corps wanted one word out of him. Sorry. Sorkin leaned in and offered him the exit. Just walk it back. Musk: “If somebody’s going to try and blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself.” No retraction. No cleanup post at 2am. No quiet calls begging the brands back. They wrote that it was over. That he’d finally buried his own company. He was worth around $230 billion that night. This week SpaceX went public. He became the first trillionaire who has ever lived. Forbes puts him at $1.1 trillion. Almost four times the next richest person alive. This was never about him. The people threatening you only hold the power you agree to hand them. Every time you apologized to keep the peace, you taught them the price was you. He refused to pay it once, in front of the entire world. The world blinked first. The crowd never remembers who knelt. It remembers who refused to flinch. The only person who can ever make you beg is you.

https://x.com/r0ck3t23/status/2066051167876948279?s=20

Teddy - PolyBackTest.com

@Bitcoin_Teddy

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15h

Elon Musk: “The reason I felt that it was important to acquire Twitter was because I could feel the walls closing in. It was outrageous that they suspended the account of a sitting president And I think it was only a matter of time before they suspended my account. Twitter and, well, pretty much all the social media companies, and Google and everyone, are controlled by far-left activists. That’s the truth of it. How do you know what’s real when it’s all filtered through a far-left San Francisco Berkeley lens? They just manipulate the truth constantly."

Glenn Beck

@glennbeck

Let me break this down for people like Elizabeth Warren and Graham Platner who just can't seem to understand how

@elonmusk

could become the world's first trillionaire without a rigged economy. They're saying a man who risked everything to RESET the space industry, inventing sustainable space travel with reusable rockets that land themselves, who stepped up and SAVED astronauts from space because Boeing and NASA couldn’t do it, doesn’t deserve his wealth? Or a man who pioneered electric vehicles while the rest of the auto industry said it could never happen, THEN GAVE HIS TECHNOLOGY AWAY FOR FREE, didn't earn that money? I don't see Pfizer doing that. Or a man who saved free speech and gave a voice to the voiceless across the world by buying Twitter and creating X? And who provided people in remote areas, totalitarian states, and warzones with access to the outside world through Starlink? That man should be punished with a wealth tax?

Dev/sys/ape

@devsysape

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12m

This was the point I decided Elon was a moral hero of mine. He refused to bend the knee, even he was rightly worried about the future of X and burning cash, he said basically "I'm not going to take money from the devil just to live." He held principles over money. That is a *good* person, and extremely rare.

Peter Carsonator

@Vastoctopus

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3h

Didn’t like the language but it clearly shows it’s not about the money and he can’t be bought! He’s definitely one of the heroes and the world is better because he’s in it!