Elon Musk’s fortune has crossed a line no individual has reached before.
SpaceX’s Nasdaq debut pushed Musk’s estimated net worth above $1 trillion after shares rose 19% on their first day of trading. The milestone reflects both the scale of SpaceX’s new public valuation and Musk’s unusually concentrated stakes across Tesla, SpaceX, and other ventures.
Musk was already the richest man on the planet before the SpaceX IPO, with a net worth more than three times that of the next-closest individual, Larry Page, the co-founder of Google. He is the only one among the 10 wealthiest billionaires to derive a large portion of his net worth from multiple companies.
While Musk will not be able to access a large portion of his net worth, he can borrow against his shares to raise billions of dollars in cash for future acquisitions or investments.
It may not be the end of Musk’s net worth growth either, with a Tesla pay package that could award him $1 trillion if he meets key objectives and the company’s valuation surpasses $10 trillion. Musk sees the introduction of the Optimus robot and the robotaxi rollout as a potential path to a tenfold increase in Tesla’s share price.
The next steps for SpaceX
SpaceX has hit the ground running on its opening day, but it was very unlikely that the stock would drop, given that it was massively oversubscribed and Musk has forced index funds such as the Nasdaq-100 to include the stock in the next few days. The question will be whether the aerospace and AI company sustains the hype over the next few months.
It has the highest price-to-sales ratio of any major company on the Nasdaq at 112.5x forward sales, far higher than the 7x average on the Nasdaq-100. This is almost double Palantir’s price-to-sales ratio of 58.8x and much higher than other 2025 stock market darlings like AppLovin (28.2x) and Nvidia (19.7x).
To reduce this, SpaceX will need to make far more in revenue than it currently does. In its IPO prospectus, Goldman Sachs said it could generate $474 billion by 2030, with $322 billion coming from the AI division, $144 billion from Starlink, and $8 billion from rocket launches.
But that seems rather fanciful unless the AI economy starts generating far more revenue than it currently does and xAI gains meaningful market share from Anthropic and OpenAI. SpaceX may turn to selling its additional capacity to rivals in the meantime, with deals already inked with Anthropic and Google to generate about $2 billion a month.
The success of this IPO could also lead to the next merger of Musk’s empire: Tesla into SpaceX. This would provide Musk with more control over his two largest companies, which are already entangled with Tesla executives moving to xAI and SpaceX engineers working on Tesla vehicles.
SpaceX success: Anthropic and OpenAI next
The early success of SpaceX may accelerate IPO plans at Anthropic and OpenAI, both of which are looking to go public before the end of 2026.
As with blockbuster films and games, major IPOs need some time to breathe, so we can expect the two major AI research labs to give SpaceX a bit of room before launching their own IPOs.
Both are reportedly targeting valuations of $1 trillion, less than half of SpaceX’s value on its first day of trading. Anthropic and OpenAI are at revenue run rates of over $30 billion, higher than SpaceX’s first-quarter run rate of $18.8 billion.
Also read: Iranian state media reportedly threatened Musk-linked assets in the Middle East, including Starlink ground facilities and SpaceX regional partners.
