Shares in Elon Musk’s SpaceX jumped 11% to $150 on their first day of trading Friday (June 12, 2026) after the biggest initial public offering in history, making the polarising entrepreneur the world’s first trillionaire as he vowed to take humanity to Mars.

The blockbuster operation, which raised more than $75 billion, is expected to kick off a series of major IPOs by AI companies in the coming months.

The debut on the Nasdaq exchange in New York capped weeks of investor frenzy over the rocket company turned AI and satellite conglomerate.

“SpaceX wants to be able to take you to the moon, take you to Mars, and ultimately beyond,” Musk said at a launch event in Starbase, Texas, surrounded by staff.

“I’m confident at this point that with the incredible team that we have here at SpaceX, we will do that for you,” Mr. Musk added.

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.”

Mr. Musk “sets very futuristic goals that no one else is doing, and I think that has got a lot of people excited,” said Sarin Sio, of financial company Dovetail, who had come to the Nasdaq headquarters.

The company priced more than 555 million shares at $135 each in a filing with the U.S. markets regulator on Thursday (June 11), valuing SpaceX at just under $1.8 trillion.

Friday’s (June 12) gain lifted its market value to around $2 trillion, placing it among the 10 most valuable U.S. companies — ahead of Tesla, Facebook-owner Meta and Walmart.

Options for nearly 83 million additional shares could push the total raised above $86 billion. Co-founded by Musk in 2002, the rocket startup has since expanded into a major satellite operator and has also folded in Musk’s artificial intelligence company — xAI — which includes the social media platform X (formerly Twitter).

Trading under the ticker symbol “SPCX,” the conglomerate is being closely watched for how Wall Street absorbs the offering.

SpaceX is the first out of the gates among leading AI giants eyeing public markets, with OpenAI and Anthropic both recently filing initial documents with regulators.

The IPO comes just over a year after Mr. Musk left President Donald Trump’s administration, following a months-long stint leading the highly contentious “DOGE” effort to slash government spending — while simultaneously juggling his CEO roles at Tesla and SpaceX.

Mr. Musk’s backing of Trump and right-wing populists in Europe — and a long list of incendiary comments on X — has seen the entrepreneur go from a broadly admired prodigy to a deeply polarising figure.

The record IPO is nonetheless a testament to Mr. Musk’s continued support among investors, with Bloomberg reporting that the offering was more than four times oversubscribed. Demand among retail investors — for whom 20% of shares were reserved — was also reported to be high.

New millionaires

The IPO is expected to mint thousands of new millionaires and several billionaires, with former and current employees — and a long list of investors — from the company’s near quarter-century history looking to cash in.

The company’s financials are giving some on Wall Street pause, as the valuation largely depends on Mr. Musk delivering on promises worthy of science fiction, including putting data centres in space and humans on Mars using as-yet unproven technology.

A lot also hangs on a huge expansion of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service, as well as the success of xAI, the maker of the Grok chatbot and Mr. Musk’s rival to OpenAI and Anthropic that has yet to gain traction.

While SpaceX is growing quickly — revenue hit $18.7 billion in 2025 — it is also losing money, producing a net loss of $4.9 billion, mainly on spending to build AI capacity.

In an extraordinary prediction, SpaceX’s filing claims it can pull in more than $28.5 trillion in revenue from its various markets. The milestone makes Musk by far the world’s richest person, his fortune dwarfing that of any other billionaire.

Published – June 12, 2026 10:10 pm IST

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Tesla and SpaceX boss Elon Musk’s net worth has surpassed $400 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, setting a new milestone on Wednesday (December 11, 2024) for the world’s richest person.

The jump in wealth, the business news outlet reported, came after SpaceX and its investors agreed to purchase as much as $1.25 billion of insider shares in a transaction that valued the rocket and satellite company at about $350 billion.

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The transaction increased Musk’s personal wealth by about $50 billion to $440 billion, Bloomberg said.

Musk’s wealth, largely based on the share price of Tesla and the valuation of SpaceX, already took a huge leap after Donald Trump won last month’s US presidential election.

Tesla’s share price is up by about 65% since the vote in November.

Musk has been a prominent political donor and advocate for Trump, pumping a staggering $270 million into the Republican’s campaign.

He has been an ever-present sidekick for Trump since his election victory, inviting him to watch a rocket launch in Texas by his SpaceX company.

Musk’s businesses all have varying degrees of interactions with US and foreign governments, and his proximity to Trump has raised concerns that Musk will be able to give advantage to his own interests.

Musk is also expected to secure a reduction in regulations for Tesla as well as elimination of tax credits on electric vehicles that will punish the car-maker’s rivals.

Trump has selected Musk to co-head the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which is set to deliver billions of dollars of cuts in federal spending and slash government red tape.

Elon Musk has become the first person to reach $400 billion in net worth, the latest milestone for the world’s richest individual.

The most recent catalyst was an insider share sale of his privately held SpaceX, which boosted Musk’s net worth by roughly $50 billion in one fell swoop to $439.2 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Musk’s fortune has staged a dramatic turnaround since late 2022, when at one point he saw his net worth drop by more than $200 billion. But it’s been especially turbocharged of late after Donald Trump’s election win last month, with Musk being his most prominent political donor and advocate.

Tesla Inc.’s stock is up about 65% since before the election, buoyed by expectations that Trump will streamline the rollout of self-driving cars and eliminate tax credits for electric vehicles that help Tesla’s competitors. Musk is slated to occupy a key role in the new administration as co-head of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, giving him a bully pulpit in Washington and a direct line to the Oval Office.

Meanwhile, the value of his artificial intelligence startup, xAI, has more than doubled since it last raised money in May to $50 billion, with the Wall Street Journal reporting last month that Trump’s victory helped drive new interest.

On Wednesday, SpaceX and its investors agreed to purchase $1.25 billion of shares from employees and other company insiders. The deal, which values the privately held space exploration firm at about $350 billion, makes SpaceX the most valuable private startup in the world.

What’s really crazy about this is that almost no investors wanted to sell shares even at a $350B valuation!

SpaceX reduced the amount of shares it bought back from employees in order to allow some new investors in.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 11, 2024

The company makes most of its money on contracts with the US government, and can likely depend on more support under a Trump administration. The president-elect lauded Musk’s vision of putting astronauts on Mars in campaign speeches, and joined Musk at a SpaceX launch in Texas shortly after the election.

Jared Isaacman, Trump’s pick for NASA head, is a billionaire tech executive who made the first commercial spacewalk on a chartered SpaceX launch in September. He praised the company as “the most innovative, literally impressive organization that I’ve ever seen” last month after investing $27.5 million in SpaceX through his payments firm in 2021.

Musk, 53, was handed a piece of bad news last week when a Delaware judge struck down his 2018 Tesla pay package, currently valued at more than $100 billion, for a second time. Tesla said it would appeal the decision, which Musk described as “absolute corruption” on X. Even if Musk’s compensation award is ultimately clawed back, he would still be the world’s richest person by a long shot.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

Elon Musk is a billionaire with the highest net worth in the world, according to Bloomberg Index. And after Donald Trump’s win in the US presidential election, the tech tycoon is close to breaking his wealth record (of $340 billion in 2021) following the rally of Tesla’s shares. The world’s richest person gained almost $21 billion on Monday as Tesla stock jumped 9 per cent, boosting his net worth to $335 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. So how long would it take for a salaried person to reach Musk levels of wealth?

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According to Forbes, the average annual salary in US is $59,428. It will take more than three million years for an average US resident to amass Mr Musk’s wealth by working a regular job, per Statista.

A study on UK’s working population claims it will take the average person 17 weeks and one hour to earn what Tesla’s founder and CEO does in five minutes. The research was done by mathematical modelling tool Gigacalculator.com that studied the earnings of the 10 highest paid bosses according to Bloomberg’s CEO pay index, and compared them to the average Briton’s full-time salary of 35,423 pounds.

In June, shareholders of Tesla voted in favour of restoring Mr Musk’s 10-year pay plan of $45 billion. According to the current exchange rate, this comes to about Rs 3.80 lakh crore in a year, or Rs 1,040 crore per day.

In September, a new report from Informa Connect Academy, a group that tracks wealth, said Mr Musk is on track to become the world’s first trillionaire by 2027. The report further said the billionaire’s wealth has been growing at an average annual rate of 110 per cent.

In terms of his earnings from assets, Mr Musk’s wealth primarily comes from his stakes in various companies like Tesla, SpaceX, X (formerly Twitter) and The Boring Company.

Mr Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, and showed his talents for entrepreneurship early, going door-do-door with his brother selling homemade chocolate Easter Eggs. According to the BBC, he developed his first computer game at the age of 12.

Mr Musk dropped out of Stanford University and founded two technology start-ups during the “dotcom boom” of the 1990s. His online banking company that eventually became PayPal was bought by eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002.

He bought X two years ago and since then, influence on the platform has skyrocketed with followers nearly doubling to 194 million.