SpaceX · Tesla · Donald Trump · Elon Musk · Alibaba · CNBC Technology
From 10% chance of success to $2 trillion market cap: SpaceX's historic IPO
Compiled by KHAO Editorial — aggregated from 3 sources. See llms.txt for citation guidance.
◎ Multiple-sources
Shortly before the opening of Nasdaq trading on Friday, Elon Musk stepped in front of a cheerful crowd at SpaceX's company town in Texas.
Key facts
- The offering pushed Alphabet's stake past the $100 billion mark, after the company invested about $900 million in SpaceX in 2015
- That's despite SpaceX having a fraction the revenue of any of tech's megacaps and racking up a $4.9 billion loss last year, with total losses since its founding of over $41 billion
- There are 10 U.S. companies worth at least $1 trillion
- The Valor founder and CEO said he met Musk more than 20 years ago through mutual friend David Sacks, a venture capitalist who until recently served as President Donald Trump's AI and crypto czar
Summary
Musk, weeks shy of his 55th birthday, told staffers that, in the early days of the company, he gave it "less than 10% chance of succeeding. "If people had told me this was going to happen, the reporter was like, man, you must be smoking some good crack," said Musk, who founded SpaceX in 2002 and has grown it to 22,000 full-time employees. Musk is now the world's first trillionaire after his company pulled off the largest IPO on record, raising $75 billion, an amount roughly triple size of the next-biggest U.S. offering, which was Alibaba's in 2014. Whatever uncertainty Musk professed to have felt when SpaceX was getting off the ground, he showed none of that in the days leading up to the IPO.