{"id":653714,"date":"2026-06-12T10:12:24","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T08:12:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=653714"},"modified":"2026-06-12T10:16:27","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T08:16:27","slug":"pretoria-born-elon-musk-on-the-verge-of-being-the-first-trillionaire-in-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/investing\/653714-pretoria-born-elon-musk-on-the-verge-of-being-the-first-trillionaire-in-the-world.html","title":{"rendered":"Pretoria-born Elon Musk on the verge of being the first trillionaire in the world"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

SpaceX has made history with the biggest-ever IPO, sending it into the top ranks of the largest public companies and putting founder Elon Musk on the verge of becoming the world\u2019s first trillionaire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The company raised $75 billion in the IPO, pricing 555.6 million shares at $135 each. SpaceX\u2019s IPO is more than double the size of Saudi Aramco\u2019s $29.4 billion listing in 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SpaceX has given the underwriting banks an over-allotment option to buy an additional 83.3 million shares at the IPO price, according to a statement on its website Thursday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This would increase the size of the deal to about $86 billion if fully exercised. The IPO drew demand for more than four times the available shares, Bloomberg News reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the IPO price, SpaceX has a market value of $1.77 trillion. Accounting for employee stock options and restricted share units, the pricing gives it a fully diluted valuation of about $1.8 trillion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The company will debut on Nasdaq and Nasdaq Texas on Friday under the symbol SPCX and potentially mint Musk as the first dollar trillionaire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Musk\u2019s net worth will jump roughly $275 billion to about $970 billion after taking into account SpaceX\u2019s offering price, just shy of trillionaire status, according to calculations by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reuters and Forbes’s calculations yielded<\/a> different results, estimating that along with Tesla and the rest of his properties, Musk’s net worth would exceed $1.1 trillion when the stock begins trading on Friday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bloomberg said Musk\u2019s SpaceX stake, including options, was worth $688 billion at $135 a share. A successful showing in public markets Friday could tip the scales into making him a trillionaire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His wealth will boom even further if he meets performance-based conditions for awards of as many as 1.3 billion additional class B shares in aggregate, split into tranches.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It would be no small feat to earn all those shares. The company\u2019s market capitalisation needs to reach $7.5 trillion, and it would have to achieve several other milestones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These include building non-Earth-based data centres capable of delivering 100 terawatts of computing power per year, and establishing a permanent human colony on Mars with at least 1 million inhabitants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The CEO, who won\u2019t be able to sell any shares until a year after the start of trading, controls 84% of the voting power after the IPO, excluding the potential over-allotment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SpaceX\u2019s governance policies ensure Musk is effectively able to choose the board members, which means only he can remove himself as CEO.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hopes-and-dreams IPO<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Musk\u2019s fan base in the retail trading community is a crucial component of the deal. They have placed more than $100 billion in orders for the stock, people familiar with the matter said on Thursday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was far more than the 20% of shares that had been reserved for them. However, not everyone is so excited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Veteran short-seller James Chanos on Wednesday called it \u201ca hopes-and-dreams IPO\u201d driven by enthusiasm for Musk and artificial intelligence rather than the fundamentals of a company that has yet to post a profit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, coupled with rule changes that could fast-track the stock into benchmark gauges like the Nasdaq-100 Index, demand from passive funds and retail investors unable to buy at the IPO price should set the stage for a solid cohort of buyers for shares of the rocket, satellite and AI company once they start trading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s probably the most hopeful IPO,\u201d said Kim Forrest, chief investment officer at Bokeh Capital Partners, adding that she doesn\u2019t buy IPOs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Buyers of SpaceX \u201cwant to be part of the future,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd I think that\u2019s oddly hopeful in this time when we\u2019re moving between the poles of greed and fear.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The IPO is set to deliver returns to a wide range of backers, from venture capital firms to special purpose vehicle investors to even members of the Trump Administration. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Led by board member Antonio Gracias, Valor Equity Partners is the second largest shareholder after Musk, and has 6.7% of the Class A shares after the listing assuming no exercise of the over-allotment, the filing shows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell and Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen each hold millions of shares and stock options.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The listing is also set to cement paper gains for private funds and current and former employees. A group of more than 1,000 are negotiating as a group with wealth management firms for better pricing and access to sophisticated tax-saving financial products ahead of the IPO, Bloomberg News has reported.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley, Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are leading the deal, with 18 other banks participating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

AI gold rush<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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SpaceX is the first of three major IPOs expected to capitalise on stock investors\u2019 appetite for the leading AI companies, a seemingly insatiable demand that has propelled benchmark US indexes to records this year despite the acceleration in inflation and economic disruption caused by the war in Iran.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anthropic PBC and OpenAI, two of the company\u2019s AI competitors, are expected to go public as soon as this year and could seek valuations of more than $1 trillion each.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bloomberg predicted that the performance of SpaceX\u2019s stock will be as closely scrutinised by Silicon Valley venture capitalists as it is by Wall Street traders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The deluge of public equity, on top of an $85 billion equity offering from Alphabet and the potential for other big-tech firms to follow suit, is triggering a debate over whether there is enough investor demand to meet the incoming supply.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a big deal as a kind of precursor for Anthropic and OpenAI,\u201d said Anthony Saglimbene, chief market strategist at Ameriprise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen I look at all three of those and the amount of capital that these companies are raising, it tells me that the demand for AI is still very strong even though we\u2019ve seen more volatility. And I think some of that volatility in the market has been positioning around the expectations for these IPOs.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Musk\u2019s first-mover advantage allows SpaceX to notch another jump in its valuation in less than a year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SpaceX\u2019s acquisition of Musk\u2019s xAI in February vaulted the combined company\u2019s private valuation to $1.25 trillion, and the original SpaceX value to $1 trillion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That was up from about $800 billion in an insider share sale in December \u2014 roughly double its mark from July 2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the IPO price of $135, SpaceX\u2019s market value ranks it among the top 10 public companies globally, and make it larger even than Musk\u2019s own Tesla.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The surge reflects the company\u2019s evolution in six months from a focus on rocket launches and providing satellite broadband internet to an aspiring AI juggernaut, whose deals providing computing infrastructure to Anthropic and Alphabet\u2019s Google for as much as $2.17 billion a month are set to become its biggest source of revenue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Musk\u2019s pitch, placing SpaceX at the heart of a science-fiction vision of the future, with data centres in space and robot factories on the moon, came at precisely the right time to capitalise on the surging appetite for investments related to the AI boom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even after a sharp sell-off in recent sessions, the Nasdaq-100 is still up 15.45% this year, while the Philadelphia Stock Exchange Semiconductor Index has surged 81.84% as a scramble for physical infrastructure drives up share prices across the sector.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet much of SpaceX\u2019s plan to dominate what the company sees as a $26.5 trillion total addressable market in AI rests on technology that either doesn\u2019t exist or hasn\u2019t been tried at scale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The company also faces stiff competition from Anthropic and OpenAI, whose chatbots have been more widely adopted by consumers and enterprise customers than xAI\u2019s Grok.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe total addressable market for space is infinite,\u201d Chanos, founder of Chanos & Co., said at the iConnections Global Alts conference in New York on Wednesday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou can build whatever stories you want \u2014 colonies on Mars, factories on the moon, data centers in space \u2014 to justify the valuation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, even among observers who were skeptical of the company\u2019s current valuation, many acknowledge Musk\u2019s achievements building Tesla and SpaceX into giants \u2014 and making money for investors, thanks in part to his loyal retail investor fanbase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Reporting with Bloomberg<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SpaceX has made history with the biggest-ever IPO, sending it into the top ranks of the largest public companies and putting founder Elon Musk on the verge of becoming the world’s first trillionaire.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":649306,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80335],"tags":[84095,83065,97858,11373,83601,167,45266,11375,48987],"class_list":["post-653714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-investing","tag-anthropic","tag-chatgpt","tag-claude","tag-elon-musk","tag-gemini","tag-google","tag-openai","tag-spacex","tag-starlink"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653714"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=653714"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653714\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":653719,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653714\/revisions\/653719"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/649306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=653714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=653714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=653714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}