Elon Musk has crossed a threshold no human being has reached before.

After SpaceX priced its initial public offering at $135 a share and the stock surged on its Nasdaq debut on Friday, Musk’s net worth climbed past $1.1 trillion, making him the world’s first trillionaire.

The IPO itself is being called the largest in history, surpassing Saudi Aramco’s 2019 listing. SpaceX offered 555.6 million shares to raise $75 billion, valuing the company at roughly $1.78 trillion at the offer price. Shares opened at $150, about 11% above the IPO price, and touched as high as $168.75 before settling around the $158-$161 range by the close of trading.

Musk owns close to 4.8 billion shares of SpaceX, around 42% of the company, along with 350 million stock options exercisable at $8.39 each. At the IPO price, that stake alone was worth somewhere between $648 billion and $866 billion depending on which valuation method is used. Add in his Tesla holdings and other assets, and his total net worth now sits at roughly $1.1 trillion, more than triple the fortune of the world’s second-richest person, Google co-founder Larry Page, whose net worth is estimated at around $290-$304 billion.

Musk marked the occasion with a ceremonial bell-ringing at Starbase, SpaceX’s Texas headquarters, reiterating his long-standing goal of making humanity “multi-planetary.” The event drew massive demand from both institutional and retail investors. Reuters reported the offering attracted more than $250 billion in orders, while Bloomberg reported retail investors alone submitted over $70 billion in requests. SpaceX reportedly set aside at least 20% of the offering for individual investors, an unusually large allocation for a deal of this size, with shares available through Schwab, Fidelity, Robinhood, SoFi and E*Trade.

A windfall for thousands of employees too

Musk isn’t the only one getting rich off this listing. The New York Times estimated that around 4,400 SpaceX employees could become millionaires once the stock began trading, a reflection of how widely SpaceX has distributed equity over the years as a retention tool in a hyper-competitive talent market.

The AI angle behind the valuation

What makes this IPO different from a typical aerospace listing is how heavily SpaceX’s pitch leaned on artificial intelligence. Earlier this year, SpaceX absorbed xAI, the AI company behind the Grok chatbot, in a deal that valued the combined entity at $1.25 trillion. That merger was later taken a step further when Musk dissolved xAI as an independent entity altogether, folding it into SpaceX as a new internal division called SpaceXAI, which now serves as the umbrella brand for Grok, Grokipedia, X, and all of SpaceX’s AI-related products.

The logic behind tying a rocket company to an AI company centers on one of Musk’s most ambitious and most disputed ideas: data centers in orbit. Musk has argued that ground-based power infrastructure cannot keep up with the electricity demands of AI computing, and that satellites harnessing solar power directly could solve the problem at scale. It’s a concept that remains largely theoretical, but it formed a central part of the narrative SpaceX used to justify its valuation to investors.

SpaceXAI has also become a significant supplier to the broader AI industry. The division’s Colossus supercomputer recently became a compute partner for Anthropic, giving Musk’s infrastructure a customer well outside his own ecosystem.

Skepticism remains

Not everyone is convinced the numbers add up. SpaceX’s 2025 revenue came in at $18.7 billion, up 33% year-over-year, with nearly a quarter of that coming from Starlink’s growing subscriber base. But the company posted a net loss of $4.9 billion for the year, and cumulative losses between January 2025 and March 2026 reached $8.7 billion. Analysts at Morningstar called the IPO “significantly overvalued,” pegging SpaceX’s fair value at closer to $780 billion, less than half of what the market assigned it on debut day.

SpaceX also broke with standard IPO convention by setting a fixed price of $135 rather than offering a preliminary range, an approach with few precedents among major US listings. The bank syndicate behind the offering was massive, led by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, alongside 18 other banks.

For now, Musk’s trillionaire status exists on paper, tied to a stock price that could move sharply in either direction. But the milestone marks a new high point for individual wealth concentration, and cements SpaceX, now fused with what was once xAI, as one of the most closely watched companies in both the aerospace and AI industries.