Elon Musk becomes world's first trillionaire as SpaceX shares soar in record $75 billion IPO

The milestone

Elon Musk became the first person in history to amass a net worth exceeding $1 trillion on 12 June 2026, after his aerospace company SpaceX made its blockbuster debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange.

SpaceX wants to be able to transport you to the Moon, to Mars and ultimately even further. I am convinced that with the incredible team we have here at SpaceX, we will do it for you.

The IPO, which raised $75 billion, instantly reshaped his fortune. Forbes estimated his net worth at $1.1 trillion, almost entirely tied to his stakes in SpaceX and Tesla.

SpaceX's record-breaking debut

SpaceX sold 555.6 million shares at $135 apiece, raising $75 billion, far exceeding the previous record of $29.4 billion set by Saudi Aramco in 2019.

Shares opened at $150 on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX, surged by more than 11% within minutes, and reached an intraday high of $176, a 30% gain. That valued the company at $1.765 trillion at the open, placing it among the ten most valuable publicly traded firms globally.

Musk rang the opening bell from SpaceX's Starbase facility in South Texas, not from Wall Street itself, underscoring the firm's extraterrestrial focus.

A fortune that defies scale

The sheer size of $1 trillion is difficult to grasp. Stacked in single-dollar bills, it would form a tower over 109,000 kilometres high, surpassing the orbit of the International Space Station and covering more than a quarter of the distance to the Moon.

My net worth is almost entirely due to the shares I hold in Tesla and SpaceX. I have less than 0.1% of that in available cash.

Had Musk counted his wealth at one dollar per second without pause, it would take roughly 31,700 years. The sum could fill more than 450 Olympic swimming pools, buy every home in Chicago or Houston with hundreds of billions to spare, or provide around $7,800 to every US household.

Ambitions from orbit to Mars

The listing is intended to fund Musk's expansive goals: deploying satellite and data-centre constellations in orbit, creating a sustained human presence on the Moon, and eventually establishing a colony of one million people on Mars.

The company, which absorbed his artificial-intelligence start-up xAI in February, has reported heavy losses: $8.7 billion from the start of 2025 through 31 March 2026. Yet investors shrugged off those concerns, betting on the long-term vision.

From railroad stock watering to the first trillionaire

The moment also marks a symbolic endpoint for a long debate about what shares represent. In the late 19th century, railroad titans such as Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould battled over "watered stock" (shares issued far beyond a company's tangible assets), a conflict that redefined capitalism.

Today, SpaceX trades at multiples that reflect its promise rather than its current earnings, a progression that has concentrated enormous wealth in digital-economy pioneers. Musk first appeared on Forbes' billionaire list in 2012 in 634th place with $2 billion. At the end of 2024 his net worth stood around $400 billion. In barely a decade and a half, he has crossed a threshold once considered unreachable.