Thousands Of SpaceX Workers To Be Millionaires After IPO

Thousands of SpaceX employees are poised to become millionaires when Elon Musk’s space exploration and AI venture holds its initial public offering as soon as this week, according to reports.

Over 4,400 of the company’s 22,000 current and hundreds of former employees will likely become millionaires when SpaceX goes public, The New York Times reported, citing an analysis from investment platform Hill.com and noting that about 400 are expected to earn at least $100 million.

The beneficiaries range from white-collar workers to technicians and service workers who staff the company’s campuses in California, Florida and Texas, according to The Wall Street Journal.

“It’s put me in a comfortable position for life,” Juan Hernandez, a welder who left SpaceX last year and is set to see the value of his shares hit $880,000 with the IPO, told the Journal.

Hernandez was initially hired at $28 per hour as a contractor before being brought on full-time, and has sold some of his stake to build a small real-estate business, the newspaper reported.

The company’s IPO is expected to price shares at $135 each, with a total valuation of about $1.77 trillion, according to the Journal, which noted workers and insiders generally won’t be allowed to sell pre-IPO shares for a couple of months.

SpaceX was valued at $800 billion last year, but its value grew to $1.25 trillion after the space exploration company merged in February with Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI. Now, SpaceX plans an IPO that could become one of the biggest stock sales ever — even though the company is currently losing billions of dollars a year. SpaceX lost $2.6 billion from operations last year on $18.7 billion in revenue, according to a May regulatory filing, and the losses kept piling up at the start of this year. xAI, which features the Grok chatbot, lost $6.4 billion in operations last year, according to a company document.

Musk got SpaceX to buy xAI earlier this year despite protests from some SpaceX investors that it was a bailout and unethical, given that he was a controlling shareholder in both.

SpaceX said last week that it plans to raise up to $75 billion when it goes public this month, setting the stage for the largest-ever stock market debut and putting Musk on course to become the world’s first trillionaire. An offering of that size would easily break the record for the largest IPO, which was set by Saudi Aramco in 2019 when the oil giant went public and raised $26 billion.

For former SpaceX engineer J. André Lavoie, the future includes continuing to renovate a hotel in Pontebba in northern Italy, where he moved five years ago, the Journal reported. His stake in the company is valued at over $28 million at the planned IPO price, according to the newspaper, and he is considering helping his town transition to cleaner heating options.

“I don’t want to just die with a pile of money in the bank,” he told the Journal.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.