SpaceX’s historic deal makes Elon Musk the first trillionaire

SpaceX completed the largest offering ever this week, raising $85.7 billion after an underwriters’ greenshoe was exercised to expand the allocation. That is more than twice the previous record, held by Saudi Aramco, and demand was especially intense from retail investors among Musk’s fan base, who submitted about $100 billion in orders, four times the shares reserved for them. The excitement even prompted a last-minute Nasdaq rule change allowing SpaceX to be added immediately to exchange-traded funds instead of waiting months, sending in a large wave of passive capital.

The deal made Elon Musk the first trillionaire in history. His fortune is now larger than the combined wealth of the four billionaires behind him, including Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison and Google’s founders, and it exceeds Israel’s expected annual GDP of $720 billion. Musk is also uniquely in charge of two of the world’s 10 most valuable companies, SpaceX and Tesla.

The gains spread to Musk’s circle as well. SpaceX employees, from welders to cafeteria workers, became millionaires and in some cases billionaires, while longtime associates also saw huge paper gains. Peter Thiel’s early investment in the company is now worth $50 billion. Antonio Gracias, Musk’s close friend and Valor founder, whose $1 million short-term loan helped save SpaceX in 2008 during a cash crunch, now has a stake worth $60 billion. Andreessen Horowitz also booked its biggest return ever, with a $10 billion holding.

Despite the soaring valuation, the company’s finances remain modest by comparison. SpaceX’s empire is split into three units, space, Starlink and xAI, into which Twitter was merged. For 2025, revenue is projected at just $18.7 billion, with total losses of $5 billion. The only profitable arm now is Starlink, which brings in $11.4 billion in revenue and $4.4 billion in net profit.

Musk justifies the valuation with a vast future market. In the prospectus, he says SpaceX’s target market is $28.5 trillion, a figure larger than every economy except the United States. Although the official base is space, the current engine is artificial intelligence: AI appears 1,251 times in the prospectus, compared with 10 references to a spiritual consciousness vision. SpaceX also bought Cursor, a leading AI coding company, in a $60 billion stock deal aimed at entering enterprise AI and weakening Anthropic, whose models previously powered Cursor. At the same time, Google agreed to pay nearly $1 billion a month, about $30 billion total, to use xAI’s server farms, a deal that also benefits Google because it owns SpaceX shares and gains as that valuation rises.