Elon Musk becomes world's first trillionaire as SpaceX lists on US stock market

Elon Musk has become the world’s first trillionaire after SpaceX shares surged the company’s Wall Street trading debut.

SpaceX shares began trading just before 12PM local time (2AM AEST) at $150, rising 11 per cent after their long-awaited Nasdaq debut and lifting the company’s value to about $1.96 trillion ($2.78 trillion).

Within minutes the share price climbed 20 per cent higher to $164 ($233).

That has put SpaceX in the top 10 of Wall Street’s biggest companies, close to Broadcom and Meta Platforms.

The launch was the biggest initial public offering (IPO) in history with the polarising entrepreneur promising he will take humanity to Mars.

“Not just a few astronauts, I mean literally you.”

The rocket startup, founded in 2022, has expanded into a major satellite operator and has also folded in Mr Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI, which includes the social media platform X.

“It is certainly hard to believe that a little company that started in a warehouse in El Segundo is now going public with the largest IPO ever,” Mr Musk said.

“If people had told me this was going to happen I was like ‘man you must be smoking some really good crack’ because I think this company’s going to fail.”

About 100 people assembled outside the Nasdaq exchange’s home in New York, where SpaceX also marked the occasion with a neon sign in Times Square reading “Building the infrastructure to the future”.

Exchanges, market makers and underwriters had been bracing for extraordinary order volumes after the company sold $75 billion ($106.5 billion) in shares prior to the launch.

But for SpaceX to reach its goal “to make life multi-planetary”, it needs billions more than it currently takes in from its rocket and satellite business. 

Between the start of 2025 and March 31, 2026, the company lost $8.7 billion ($12.4 billion).

It was a test as to whether unprecedented investor demand could translate into a blockbuster opening for the world’s biggest IPO. 

SpaceX is the first of three large artificial intelligence companies expected to start selling their shares on the US market with OpenAI and Anthropic recently filing initial documents with regulators.

But not all investors were thrilled about SpaceX potentially showing up in their holdings of index funds. 

Officials from pension funds for firefighters, teachers and other workers in California and New York sent a letter to SpaceX last month decrying some of the provisions in its IPO, including the “super voting shares”, mandatory arbitration of shareholder claims instead of the possibility of lawsuits and how much power Mr Musk will hold over the company.

Oxfam America said that Mr Musk was now richer than the poorest 46 per cent of the world population, or 3.8 billion people, combined. 

Nabil Ahmed, Oxfam America’s senior director of economic justice, called it a “dark day for democracy” earlier this week.

“Musk will be a government-backed trillionaire whose fortune was fuelled by an era of regressive public policy choices — decisions rigged by a tiny few to fuel their fortunes, and overwhelmingly supported by political leaders,” he said.

Mr Musk was appointed to the Trump administration last year as a “special government employee” and accompanied the US president on his state visit to China last month.