Trevor Hise was 22 years old when he graduated and, as is often the case, his parents begged him to accept a stable, well-paying position at General Electric. However, led by the passion of youth and curiosity, he preferred to dedicate the next 12 years of his professional career to the madness of launch rockets into space and catch them in flight again on their return to earth. The company was called SpaceX and Hise no longer works there.
However, as how did he count The New York TimesHise has discovered that the Space The story of this former employee of Elon Musk could seem like one of those caroms that life sometimes gives. But, broadly speaking, it is the story of thousands of people who are going to wake up tomorrow with a fortune in your stock portfolio after Space X’s IPO.
The largest IPO in history. Friday, June 12, 2026 has been marked in red on the calendars of thousands of investors for months: SpaceX debuts on the Nasdaq under the symbol SPCX. The company’s maneuvers in the months prior to its listing on the stock market make its figures be the most ambitious ever recorded in a stock market IPO: a fixed price of $135 per share and 555.6 million securities placed to raise $75 billion. It is almost three times higher than the previous record held Saudi Aramco since 2019.
The expectation it has raised is no wonder, since the company founded by Elon Musk stands on three of the legs with the greatest growth projection: artificial intelligence with xAI integrationspace race as the main activity of Space X and communications deployment via satellite with Starlink.
The total valuation of the company before its IPO reaches 1.77 trillion dollarsa figure that places it above JPMorgan, Berkshire Hathaway, Meta and Tesla itself. Only six S&P 500 companies are valued above Space NVIDIA in the lead with 5.2 billion.
More than 4,000 people about to become millionaires. According to published Fortunemore than 4,400 Space X employees and former employees will become millionaires thanks to the company’s stock market debut. Of that group, some 400 employees and managers will earn more than $100 million or more from the operation. The fact of turning its employees into millionaires is another of the peculiarities of this IPO since, as Andrew Benson, executive director of the platform, recognized Hill.com investments to the American media, “you usually only see founders become billionaires.”
The company included participations in the compensation packages of welders, cooks and facility technicians who agreed to collect part of their salary on paper. It was a risky bet on their part because those shares could have remained a dead letter, but trust in the company will bring them a juicy reward.
Gavin Petit joined in 2012 as a launch engineer with a salary of $80,000 and received shares valued at $13.80 each at the time. The engineer agreed to collect his bonuses in more shares year after year, something considered risky in a company whose rockets were still failing. Now more than 50,000 shares, which are equivalent to about 6.75 million dollars.
Those who endured Among the great beneficiaries of this Initial Public Offering is Gwynne Shotwellpresident and chief operating officer of SpaceX. She was employee number 11 when she joined the company in 2002, leaving a stable job to bet on a startup that then had everything to prove. The board accumulates almost 12.6 million shares, according to the documents presented before the SEC, which at IPO price represents a fortune of about 1.7 billion dollars. Shotwell herself recognized to CNBC that for years it was not clear that they would go public: “Now seems like the right time.”
As and as you remember Expansionthe IPO will also generously reward those investors who have provided financial support to the company since its inception, as is the case with Peter Thiel o Luke Nosek, co-founders of PayPal and members of the group known as “PayPal Mafia“.
The first billionaire in history. According to official data According to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Elon Musk owns approximately 42% of SpaceX shares. That’s about 4.8 billion shares, plus hundreds of millions of additional stock options. At the IPO price, that stake alone is around $688 billion.
Adding that figure to his stake in Tesla and the rest of his businesses, Forbes esteem and his fortune at $982.3 billion before the stock market debut, which leaves him just a breath away from crossing $1 trillion, a milestone that no one has reached before.
To gauge the magnitude of this figure, his personal fortune already exceeds the capitalization of ExxonMobil and rivals that of Berkshire Hathaway. Although, as Musk himself has pointed out on more than one occasion, almost all of that money They are stocks, not cash.. A number on a screen that goes up and down according to the market.
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Image | Flickr (Gage Skidmore), SpaceX
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