SpaceX IPO Turns 4,400 Employees Into Millionaires Overnight

For the welders, machinists, and launch engineers who traded years of below-market pay for SpaceX stock, Friday was the day the bet paid. The company's record market debut is set to turn more than 4,400 current and former employees into millionaires, far beyond its founder.

Key Points:

Mueller's Long Bet

Tom Mueller built the rockets that made the company possible, hired as its first employee in 2002. He left in 2020 but held onto his shares. Musk always told staff their salary mattered less than their equity, Mueller recalled, and "that day is here."

Juan Hernandez moved from Mexico and learned to weld for the paycheck, joining in 2015 at $28 an hour, then collected $10,000 in stock and kept buying more through payroll. He sold a slice in 2020 for a Texas home, and his remaining shares are worth about $880,000.

Launch engineer Trevor Hise gathered more than 100,000 shares over 12 years, now worth at least $13.5 million. Gavin Petit took an early grant at $13.80 a share, held onto roughly 50,000 shares, and paid off his Denver home. J. André Lavoie, who got his grants years ago, is sitting on more than $28 million while renovating a hotel in Italy.

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SpaceX's Record Debut

SpaceX shares opened near $150 on the Nasdaq Friday, about 11% above the $135 price the company priced the night before.

The $75 billion sale, the largest IPO on record, valued the rocket maker near $1.77 trillion and made Elon Musk the first known trillionaire on paper.

An analysis by investment platform Hiive projected that more than 4,400 employees and alumni would clear $1 million, with about 400 above $100 million each. Investor demand topped $250 billion, more than three times the stock on offer. By comparison, Google's 2004 IPO created roughly 1,000 millionaires, and Facebook's 2012 listing did about the same.

Equity Built The Wealth

From the start, the company paid below-market salaries and filled the gap with stock at every level, not just the top. Roughly 100 employees have since pooled holdings worth $1 billion to $5 billion to win cheaper management fees.

The shift is already visible in Brownsville, Texas, one of the nation's poorest cities, where more than 3,000 work at Starbase. Median home prices in the surrounding county have climbed from $131,000 in 2014 to over $281,000 today. Most of those shares stay locked for now, the delayed payoff for two decades of below-market pay.

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