Elon Musk has become the world's first trillionaire, according to multiple financial outlets, after his company SpaceX completed its initial public offering on Friday. The milestone marks the first time any individual has reached a net worth of $1 trillion, based on real-time wealth tracking.
SpaceX priced its shares at $135 each on Thursday night, ahead of its Friday debut on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol SPCX, according to CBS News. The offering raised about $75 billion, which financial reporters describe as a record amount for a single stock listing.
The IPO valued SpaceX at roughly $1.77 trillion, a figure that was revised down from an earlier target of about $2 trillion, according to a report from 24/7 Wall St. Musk holds close to 42 percent of SpaceX's equity through a dual class share structure, which gives him about 82 percent of the company's voting power, Yahoo Finance reported.
At the $135 offering price, Musk's stake in SpaceX is worth about $866.5 billion on paper, based on figures from SpaceX's amended prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on June 3, according to 24/7 Wall St. Before the IPO, CBS News reported Musk's fortune at around $813 billion. Adding his SpaceX stake to his existing Tesla holdings and other assets pushed his total net worth past the $1 trillion mark once trading began.
Different wealth trackers show slightly different figures. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which adjusts for lock up restrictions that limit how quickly Musk can sell his shares, placed his net worth at about $988 billion at the IPO price, just under the trillion dollar line, according to Yahoo Finance. Any rise in SpaceX's share price above its offering level on its first trading day would be enough to push that figure over $1 trillion as well.
The gap between Musk and the world's second richest person is now the widest ever recorded on a global wealth ranking, according to a report from Billionaires Africa. Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, holds the number two spot with an estimated net worth between $288 billion and $298 billion, depending on the source. The Washington Post reported that Musk's wealth now rivals the combined fortunes of Page, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin and Larry Ellison.
Al Jazeera reported that Musk's new wealth amounts to roughly 3 percent of the entire United States economy. The outlet also cited Guido Alfani, a professor of economic history at Bocconi University in Milan, who said that when measured by the amount of labor a fortune could buy, Musk may now be the richest individual in history, excluding monarchs and rulers whose wealth was tied to the state.
SpaceX was founded in 2002 in El Segundo, California, with about $100 million of Musk's own money from the sale of PayPal, according to Billionaires Africa. The company struggled early on, with three of its first four Falcon 1 rocket launches ending in failure. A successful fourth launch in September 2008 helped the company avoid bankruptcy. SpaceX has since grown into a major force in the aerospace industry, largely on the strength of its Starlink satellite internet service, which now serves millions of paying customers worldwide and provides most of the company's revenue, according to Yahoo Finance.
Underwriters for the IPO are holding an option, known as a greenshoe, to sell about 83 million additional shares worth roughly $11.2 billion if demand remains strong, Yahoo Finance reported.
Columbia Business School leadership professor Michael Morris told local news outlet WANE that crossing the trillion dollar mark is unlikely to change much for Musk personally, since his wealth was already enormous and this simply adds more zeros to the total.
The final confirmation of Musk's trillionaire status depends on how SpaceX shares trade once the market opens, and on how major wealth trackers such as Forbes and Bloomberg calculate the closing numbers for the day.