A man who earned $28 an hour at SpaceX is about to become a millionaire today because of the IPO.
But he is just 1 of 4,400 SpaceX employees becoming millionaires today.
SpaceX begins trading on Nasdaq today under the ticker SPCX, priced at $135 per share and valued at $1.77 trillion.
The offering raised $75 billion and drew more than $250 billion in investor demand, more than three times oversubscribed.
More than 4,400 current and former SpaceX employees are projected to become millionaires today. Around 400 of them will hold stakes worth over $100 million each.
To put that in context, the Google IPO in 2004 created roughly 1,000 millionaires. Facebook's 2012 listing produced a similar number. SpaceX is doing more than four times both of them in a single day.
And the majority of these people are not founders or executives.
They are engineers, welders, machinists, and launch technicians who took equity over cash and held it for years.
Juan Hernandez moved from Mexico and learned to weld for the money.
He joined SpaceX in 2015 earning $28 an hour. When he went full time, the company gave him $10,000 worth of stock. He held it, bought more through payroll deductions, and sold a small portion in 2020 to buy property in Texas.
His remaining shares are worth $880,000 today.
Trevor Hise joined as a launch engineer straight out of college in 2011. He spent 12 years accumulating shares through salary, bonuses, and reinvestment. He is 37 years old and walking away with more than $13.5 million.
Gavin Petit started in 2012 on an $80,000 base salary with a small initial grant priced at $13.80 per share. He took every bonus in stock.
He has already paid off his home in Denver from earlier tender offer windows and now holds a stake worth several million dollars.
J. André Lavoie, an engineer who received grants years ago, is sitting on more than $28 million. He is currently in Italy renovating a hotel.
Tom Mueller was SpaceX's first employee, hired in 2002 to build the engines that made all of this possible. He left in 2020 but kept his equity.
This week he said: "Elon always said that your salary is one thing, but it's the equity that's gonna be worth something. That day is here."
This is what SpaceX's compensation model actually looked like from the beginning. The company paid below market salaries and made up the difference in equity at every level of the organisation, not just at the top.
Stock options vested over four to six years. Workers could buy additional shares at a 15% discount through a company purchase plan.
Early option grants were priced below $2 per share. Even 2025 grants carried exercise prices between $37 and $42. At $135 today, those positions are sitting at 3x returns minimum.
The physical impact is already visible in Brownsville, Texas, one of the poorest cities in the United States, where more than 3,000 SpaceX employees work at Starbase.
Median home prices in the surrounding county have gone from $131,000 in 2014 to over $281,000 today.
More than 100 SpaceX employees pooled their combined holdings, estimated between $1 billion and $5 billion to negotiate institutional level wealth management fees as individual workers.
Today, SPCX opens and 4,400 people find out what years of holding actually pays.
@saravofcl Tons of hardcore DMK families including several of my friends have enrolled their children into Kendriya Vidayala schools.
They pay zero rupees as school fees.
@offl_Lawrence Come to politics 💯%.
But only if you come with complete open free markets capitalism policy where Government will completely all businesses from Dairy to Liquor to Electricity to Transport, etc.
A grim 2 to 6 crore population live in abject poverty & free markets only answer.
@sansbarrier Absolutely horrible move. Why don’t then Tamil Nadu Government become a Sovereign Wealth Fund?
வாத்தியர் ஆட்சி was grim dark big government socialism ஆட்சி & was a disaster except for privatization of engineering education.
A wild day looms tomorrow as Nasdaq Software gets whipped by unprecedented massive volume on SpaceX.
இது capitalist திருவிழா.
$spcx
https://t.co/I2T1DaidFo
@sansbarrier Absolutely horrible move. Why don’t then Tamil Nadu Government become a Sovereign Wealth Fund?
வாத்தியர் ஆட்சி was grim dark big government socialism ஆட்சி & was a disaster except for privatization of engineering education.
@CMOTamilnadu@TVKVijayHQ Good first investment.
Also please get Government completly out of all businesses from Liquor to Dairy to Electricity to Busses to Minerals, etc.
Government should absolutely not be doing businesses.
No country other than us, do this.
BREAKING: South Korea’s KOSPI just exploded more than +8.5%, making it one of the biggest rallies in the index’s history.
Over ₩620,500,000,000,000 ($425 BILLION) was added to South Korea's stock market on hopes for an end to the Middle East conflict.
A buy-side sidecar was triggered shortly after the market opened.
@gnoble79 You missed the biggest voodoo of them all - ‘Data Centers in Space via Starship & Starlink’.
His cars are junk & his suicide Robotaxis & voodoo Robots never will happen but the cult never lets $tsla fall though.
Same thing for $spcx will happen as cult floods in.
We continue to apply Ukrainian long-range sanctions against Russian military facilities and the oil industry. In particular, last night Ukrainian FP-5 Flamingos struck a military plant in Cheboksary that supplies the occupier’s army with components for drones and missiles. I thank the Armed Forces of Ukraine for their precision! The Kuibyshev oil refinery in the Samara region was also hit last night. The distance from the frontline is more than 900 kilometers. I am grateful to the warriors of the Special Operations Forces, the Unmanned Systems Forces, and the Defense Intelligence of Ukraine. The entirely just responses of the Security Service of Ukraine also reached two oil infrastructure facilities in the Vladimir region, at a distance of 700 kilometers. I thank everyone who fights and works for Ukraine!
@PiyushGoyal@MVenkaiahNaidu@narendramodi In next election, with all due respect, your minority government will be voted out.
As AI sweeps in, big government socialism India faces a grim future snd AI will end the big government socialism government.
Ukrainian FP-5 Flamingo missiles hit Russia's Cheboksary about 950 km away
The target reportedly was the VNIIR-Progress factory, producing electronics for Russian weapons.
📹Exilenova+
A TON OF THINGS HAPPENED IN THE STOCK MARKET TODAY.
Here's a full recap:
1. The Nasdaq $QQQ fell as much as 5.3% intraday, marking one of the sharpest intraday drawdowns we’ve seen in years. The last time we came close to that kind of move was just last Friday, and before that, you had to go back to April 2025. Goldman noted that today’s NDX intraday move was the largest in the last three years. However, buyers stepped in aggressively off the lows, and $QQQ finished down 1%. This is the second trading session within 3 days of historic intra-day drawdowns across tech.
2. President Trump today said Iran shot down a U.S. Apache helicopter while it was patrolling over the Strait of Hormuz, with two pilots involved and both reportedly safe and uninjured. He framed the incident as a direct attack on the United States and said the U.S. must respond, raising the risk of escalation in one of the world’s most important oil-shipping corridors.
3. China is preparing a roughly $295B, five-year plan to build a nationwide AI data center network, with much of the infrastructure expected to be operated by state-backed firms. Beijing is also aiming to source 80%+ of key technology domestically, leaning on local suppliers like Huawei, which could further limit opportunities for U.S. chipmakers like $NVDA and $AMD in China’s AI infrastructure buildout.
4. The top 10 most active options today by contracts traded were $NVDA with 3.4M contracts, $TSLA with 2.7M contracts, $AAPL with 1.7M contracts, $MU with 731K contracts, $AMZN with 721K contracts, $MSFT with 716K contracts, $INTC with 629K contracts, $MRVL with 524K contracts, $NOK with 494K contracts, and $PLTR with 493K contracts. Nvidia led options activity with more than 3.4M contracts traded, followed by Tesla at 2.7M and Apple at 1.7M.
5. Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5, its first broadly available Mythos-class model and its most capable general-use Claude model to date. The company also introduced Claude Mythos 5, which runs on the same underlying model but offers fewer restrictions for trusted-access users. Anthropic said Mythos-class traffic will now be retained for 30 days to support safety monitoring.
6. U.S. tech dispersion is getting extreme. Over the past three months, the top 20% of tech stocks have beaten the bottom 20% by roughly 120 percentage points, the second-largest gap on record. The only higher reading came during the Dot-Com Bubble, when the spread peaked around 135 percentage points. This gap has quadrupled over the last year, widening even faster than the 1999–2000 surge. The strongest tech names are up about 110% over the last three months, close to February 2000 levels, while the weakest 20% are down roughly 10%.
7. Robinhood $HOOD reported strong May 2026 monthly metrics, with growth across customers, assets, trading volumes, and interest-earning assets. Funded customers rose to 27.7M, up 110K M/M and 1.76M Y/Y. Total platform assets hit $377B, up 9% M/M and 48% Y/Y. On activity, equity notional volume was $315B, up 27% M/M and 75% Y/Y, while options contracts traded reached 231M, up 3% M/M and 29% Y/Y. Crypto notional volume was $12.2B, up 3% M/M and 4% Y/Y, and event contracts traded surged to 3.9B, up 22% M/M, showing continued momentum in Robinhood’s newer prediction/event contract business.
8. The Social Security retirement trust fund in the US is now projected to run out in 2032, just six years from now, according to the latest trustees report from the Social Security Administration. If Congress does not act before then, only about 78% of scheduled retirement benefits will be payable, meaning roughly one in every four dollars of promised benefits would effectively disappear. Social Security has never missed a payment in its history, but the funding timeline has not improved, putting more pressure on lawmakers to address the shortfall before 2032.
9. Baird reiterated an Outperform rating on $PLTR Palantir with a $200 price target after attending AIPCon 10, saying investors still underappreciate several parts of the story. The firm highlighted Palantir’s expanding partner ecosystem, especially with Accenture, Deloitte, Bain, and Nvidia, which could broaden its reach across major enterprise and regulated-industry customers. Baird also pointed to AI Forward Deployed Engineers as a major productivity unlock, arguing they could help Palantir scale with limited headcount growth. The report emphasized that Palantir’s moat is more than just its codebase, citing nearly two decades of field experience, customer feedback loops, and deep deployment expertise. Baird also said Palantir’s outcome-focused approach is fundamentally different from AI labs and traditional consulting firms, and flagged AI-powered security as a growing opportunity.
10. SpaceX $SPCX told investors it is targeting its first orbital AI compute demonstrations by late 2027, ahead of the “as early as 2028” timeline referenced in its IPO filing, per Reuters. Executives said the early deployments would be demonstrator systems designed to prove the concept before a broader commercial rollout. The first AI satellites are expected to use Nvidia $NVDA chips, with compute power comparable to an Nvidia GB300 rack. SpaceX has also requested approval to launch up to 1 million space-based data-center satellites. Its IPO priced at $135/share, targeting a $1.75T valuation, with trading expected to begin Friday on Nasdaq under $SPCX.
11. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas told CNBC the company still plans to go public in 2028, regardless of how other major AI IPOs like Anthropic, OpenAI, or SpaceX perform in the market. He described SpaceX as a potential “leading indicator” for the coming wave of AI mega-IPOs, while also saying AI spending is starting to shift away from “mindless spending” and toward more cost-efficient models that can deliver the same results at lower prices.
12. In May, 43.6% of Americans said they were financially worse off than a year ago, the highest reading since January 2023. It was also the third straight monthly increase, marking the longest streak of worsening financial sentiment since 2022. For context, this measure peaked at 51.3% in June 2022, while before the pandemic it never topped 20% during the 2017–2019 period. Looking ahead, 36% of U.S. consumers expect to be financially worse off over the next year, the second-highest reading since October 2022 and roughly double the average seen from 2015 to 2019.
WALL STREET IS THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH.