Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire yesterday after a frenzy for shares in his rocket company SpaceX.

Mr Musk, who wants to hurl data centres into space and colonise Mars, declared his ambition was nothing less than ‘to make life multi-planetary’ as he launched the New York stock market float.

Investors were keen to climb aboard, sending the aerospace firm’s shares soaring by more than 20 per cent and lifting its valuation from $1.8trillion (£1.3trillion) to more than $2trillion (£1.49trillion).

The initial public offering on New York’s Nasdaq exchange was the world’s biggest.

And it was enough to lift the wealth of Mr Musk, 54 – already the world’s richest man – beyond the trillion-dollar mark thanks to the increased valuation of his stake in the company.

The surge in SpaceX’s share price to more than $160 also delivered an instant profit to investors who had bought in at $135. They included UK buyers who snapped up £270million worth of stock. 

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.

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.