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Chapter 1: What made the SpaceX IPO a historic event?
When SpaceX went public on Friday, it kicked off the first day of trading for what might have been the most highly anticipated initial public offering in history. It was certainly the most expensive one. SpaceX shares opened at a record $150 a piece. In Texas, CEO Elon Musk stood in front of a video of rockets launching and addressed investors.
And let me tell you, if people had told me this was going to happen, I was like, man, you must be smoking some really good crack.
But the IPO itself wasn't the only history made last week. SpaceX going public also made Musk the world's first trillionaire.
The stake in SpaceX now worth $820 billion.
Chapter 2: How did Elon Musk become the world's first trillionaire?
You add in that Tesla stake worth about $280 billion, and his total net worth as we have it right now is over $1.1 trillion. It's remarkable. It's clearly a watershed moment.
Our colleague Teo Francis covers executive pay. Why is this an important moment? It's pretty striking.
You know, I do our annual ranking of executive pay, of CEO pay, and every year there's a few CEOs who make $100 million or more. $100 million, like, that's a lot of money.
And yet, I have to remember to use an M and say million instead of B for billion when you're talking about the wealth of people like Zuckerberg and Bezos and Allison and, of course, Musk when we're going to have to start using the T. It's a really remarkable moment in terms of individual wealth. And I think the real question is, how far does it go?
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Tuesday, June 16th. Coming up on the show, who wants to be a trillionaire? Before the SpaceX IPO, before he was a trillionaire, you did the story where you tried to put into context just how wealthy Elon Musk is. Why is that such a difficult number to communicate?
I mean, do we really understand how big a trillion dollars is? Like, that's usually the kind of number that we talk about when we talk about economies, when we talk about GDP growth. Not when we talk about companies, even. Very few companies until recently even had a trillion-dollar market capitalization, which means the total value of what investors think they're worth going forward.
Only a handful of companies have reached that level. But now we're talking about an individual, and that's just totally new territory.
Right. It's hard to wrap your mind around that number, much less what it could mean for a single human being.
Exactly.
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of Musk's net worth compared to other billionaires?
Musk also co-founded Neuralink, a startup that's trying to develop brain implant technology. And, of course, there's SpaceX. Though the company's financial engine is Starlink, a satellite internet service, SpaceX promises to build towards commercial spaceflight.
SpaceX just pulled off a test launch of its latest Starship mega rocket. So here's what it sounded like when it took off from the launch pad in South Texas.
By 2012, Musk had become a billionaire, and his wealth kept growing.
You can see how the value of some of his portfolio now lets him do things in other parts of his portfolio as well. And it's kind of a snowball. It's kind of a snowball effect.
In 2021, Musk became the richest person in the world for the first time. You know, for a long time, Musk was in that conversation along with people like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. But those other guys are like down in the, it's crazy to say, down in the $200 billion range. And Musk has, you know, clearly exploded beyond that. When and sort of how did that start to happen?
I mean, some of this was just in the past year, really. When we looked at American billionaires in late summer, early fall last year, he was ahead of the other big tech billionaires, but not by such a huge amount.
At the time, his wealth was valued at $423 billion. It's more than doubled since.
At this point, you know, you can add up Bezos and Ellison and Zuckerberg's wealth, and it's still not Elon Musk's.
Is there a historic analog for this level of wealth for a single person? Like, does Elon Musk have more money now than like John D. Rockefeller did in his time?
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