Elon Musk crossed into uncharted financial territory yesterday, becoming the first person in history to amass a fortune of more than $1 trillion after a buying spree drove up shares in his space venture, SpaceX.
As the company made its debut on the New York stock market, Musk — who has spoken of putting data centres in orbit and establishing human settlements on Mars — said his goal was nothing short of “making life multi-planetary.”
Demand from investors was intense, pushing SpaceX stock up by more than 20 per cent and raising the company’s market value from $1.8 trillion (£1.3 trillion) to above $2 trillion (£1.49 trillion).
The listing on New York’s Nasdaq exchange marked the largest initial public offering ever seen worldwide.
That jump in valuation was enough to send Musk, 54, already ranked as the richest person on the planet, past the trillion-dollar threshold because of the increased worth of his holding in the business.
SpaceX shares climbed to more than $160, handing immediate gains to investors who had purchased stock at $135. Among them were buyers in the UK, who acquired around £270 million worth of shares.
The frenzy came despite the fact that the company remains heavily loss-making – to the tune of billions of dollars a year.
Mr Musk joined a ceremonial bell-ringing at the Nasdaq remotely from SpaceX’s Starbase headquarters in Texas.
Elon Musk speaking via videolink on Friday at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York City
President and COO of SpaceX, Gwynne Shotwell and CFO and President of Strategic Acquisitions, Bret Johnsen are joined by company leadership as they ring the opening bell to celebrate during SpaceX’s initial public offering
A Spacex Flacon 9 rocket lifts off from Space Launch Complex 40 on June 12, 2026 in Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida
And he declared that his ‘multi-planetary’ ambitions extended to ‘not just a few astronauts, I mean literally you’.
‘Whoever you are watching this, SpaceX wants to be able to take you to the moon, take you to Mars and ultimately beyond,’ Mr Musk added.
He admitted that, at one point, he had given SpaceX ‘a 10 per cent chance of succeeding at all’.
The spectacular lift-off for SpaceX shares adds yet another extraordinary chapter to Mr Musk’s career.
Already hugely wealthy via his electric-car business Tesla – the world’s most valuable automobile company – he is now at the forefront of the space industry.
Mr Musk is loathed by the Left for his political interventions on X – which he also owns – in support of populist Right-wing causes, often seen as extremist and divisive.
Yet investors have continued to throw money at him as his ventures attract a so-called ‘Musk premium’ because of the belief that he will succeed even in the most outlandish of ambitions.
In an extraordinary 200,000-word prospectus setting out SpaceX’s plans and finances ahead of its shares being offered to the public, Mr Musk outlined his ambition to help create ‘a space-faring civilisation’.
‘By moving beyond the only home we have ever known, we ensure… that the light of consciousness will not be tied to a single planet subject to the inevitable hazards of a harsh and vast universe,’ the prospectus says. ‘We do not want humans to have the same fate as dinosaurs.’
And the company states that its mission is nothing less than ‘to build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multi-planetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars’.
Mr Musk’s goals include establishing vast data centres – processing units for artificial intelligence (AI) – in space as well as achieving a $7.5trillion (£5.6trillion) valuation for the company.
They even specify that Mr Musk must maintain ‘a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants’. The plans extend to saving humanity from being exposed to ‘existential threats that are unpredictable and uncontrollable on a planetary scale’.
SpaceX was founded in 2002. Its reusable rockets operation now dominates the satellite-launch sector and the business earns billions of dollars from contracts with space agency Nasa and the US military.
It also includes Starlink, a network of satellites that provides internet connection to remote locations.
