Elon Musk may never colonize Mars as he promised, but enough investors view the SpaceX founder as the kind of miracle man that they will help him achieve another ambitious goal Friday when he takes the rocket company public.
The world’s richest man is set to become his first billionaire.
Known for his brilliant technological advances, as well as wild claims and deadlines, Musk is expected to break that billion-dollar mark in a major initial public offering as investors bet on a company that has lost as much as its ambitions. Before SpaceX’s first trade, Forbes put Musk’s net worth at $982.6 billion.
In addition to establishing a one-million-person Martian colony, the company has promised to save humanity by establishing other outposts, launching data centers the size of football fields into orbit and outdoing Anthropic and OpenAI in the race to monetize artificial intelligence.
To achieve its goals, SpaceX needs billions more than it currently takes in its rocket and satellite business. Between the beginning of 2025 and March 31, 2026, the company lost $ 8.7 billion.
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Large institutional buyers and small investors alike showed they were willing to take the opportunity, paying a high enough price of 555.6 million shares to raise $75 billion. That would easily surpass the current title holder, Saudi Aramco, the oil giant that raised $26 billion in its first offering of 2019.
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If the IPO goes off without a hitch, its value will fall mainly on one thing: Musk.
The soon-to-be trillionaire – on paper at least – made his fortune by building two companies, Zip2 and PayPal, which netted him an estimated $200 million. He used that money to start SpaceX and invest in Tesla, and defied the odds by building an aerospace company that figured out how to reuse rockets and a car company that made electric cars cool.
Musk has amassed vast fortunes, much of it in stocks he hasn’t cashed in or given shares that he’ll only get if Tesla or SpaceX meet ambitious performance goals. His latest payment from Tesla has drawn criticism from the Vatican. At Tesla, he’s worried about shareholders fighting regulators or dividing his attention between multiple companies and last year taking part in the Trump administration.
But the rising stock price has offset all the ills: Since going public in 2010, Tesla has returned 20,000% to shareholders, or more than $1.2 trillion in investor wealth. That helped raise Musk’s pre-SpaceX IPO valuation to $795 billion, according to Forbes magazine.
SpaceX is the first of three “megacap” companies expected to go public this year, followed by Anthropic and OpenAI. Nasdaq even revised its rules to allow SpaceX to enter the funds tied to its index in 15 days, meaning investors would end up buying the rocket maker’s shares sooner.
Not all investors are excited about the SpaceX potential showing up in their index fund holdings. Officials from the pension funds of firefighters, teachers and other workers in California and New York sent a letter to SpaceX last month criticizing some of the provisions in its IPO, including “superior voting shares,” mandatory arbitration of shareholder claims instead of the possibility of lawsuits and how much power Musk would have over the company.
© 2026 The Canadian Press
