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.
To all the people just tuning in:
Hi. I’m Josiah. I’m a Messianic Jew, which means I’m a Jew who believes that Yeshua (Jesus) is the Messiah.
Yes, I’m really Jewish.
Yes, I really do love Jesus.
No, the two aren’t incompatible, and I don’t stop being Jewish when I believe in Yeshua.
Yes, it’s not unheard of for Jews to follow Yeshua, just like how all the apostles were Jewish followers of Yeshua, along with tens of thousands more Jewish believers (Acts 21:20). Messianic Jews like me are still around, and I bet even more Jewish believers will make an appearance in the comments.
No, God has not ended His covenant relationship with the people of Israel (the Jewish ethnicity)—I’m evidence of that fact, because God always preserves a remnant (Romans 11:1).
No, I don’t believe that Jews automatically go to Heaven; the only way to salvation for Jew and Gentile alike is through faith in Yeshua, not through ethnicity or good works.
Feel free to ask me if you have more questions!
Shalom, peoples.
Everyone always talking about “talent density” in Silicon Valley when we really should be talking about how 80% of pretzels in America come from a small region of Pennsylvania
I was one of 20 frozen embryos my parents adopted 🧊🧊
I am the only one who survived the freeze, thaw, and transfer.
Before I had a birth certificate, a name, or even a heartbeat in the womb, I had an inventory number.
Today, over one million embryonic human beings remain frozen in storage across the United States. I was once one of them.
I wrote about my story for @realDailyWire.
Thank you to @madelineefry for helping bring this conversation to a broader audience. ✨✨✨
https://t.co/KuUge54Oq6.
Starbucks and Pizza Hut just got absolutely cooked by AI. Starbucks ditched their system after it failed hard, and a Pizza Hut franchisee is suing for $100 million saying AI made everything worse.
Now companies are admitting it’s actually cheaper to use humans. The AI revolution everybody was screaming about is turning out to be a very expensive flop🕺🏻
@NocturnalKing88@McJuggerNuggets Human life is infinitely more valuable than any animal life for a variety of reasons. Human intelligence alone far outweighs that of any animal, and many believe humans have souls with an afterlife, while animals do not.
@JohnGonzales_19@MarlboroMelvis@jackcalifano Ha, speaking of, I paid $98 to see Lady Gaga’s Enigma show in Vegas in 2019. Even for her as a “huge celebrity” I paid less than $100!
@VitalVegas I can’t handle how crazy these Adele ticket prices are!
p.s. I feel privileged that I snagged a Lady Gaga Enigma ticket for just $98 + fees in Aug 2018 for a show in June 2019. It was a fancy 3D ticket too 😁
@bakedlesbean@jackcalifano Wow mid level 😆😆 The Struts are one of the most underrated bands to exist, I’d pay triple to see them and I’ve seen them all over the country from Philly to Vegas!