The Economist headline says it all: “Wall Street’s undignified SpaceX mania”.
While Space Exploration Technologies Corporation has launched mankind to the stars, investors are hoping their bet in the initial public offering (IPO) this week will be similarly stratospheric.
“Ahead of SpaceX’s gigantic initial public offering, you can see more rockets on Wall Street than at Cape Canaveral,” writes The Economist. “It’s a sign of investment banks’ abasement before the likes of Elon Musk and the bosses of the AI companies who plan to follow him onto the market.”
It adds: “Is that a rocket in your lobby, or are you just happy to see me?”
If you thought the mania for AI stocks was anything, this IPO has been massively hyped up. Hoping to raise $75-billion, it will value the company at a whopping $1.75-trillion.
“The ticker is expected to be SPCX. One assumes ‘MARS’ was unavailable, ‘ELON’ too subtle, and ‘FOMO’ already implied,” business journalist Tim Cohen wrote in his excellent Loose Cannon newsletter. “The IPO also raises the usual Musk-era governance question: are investors buying into a company, or buying a seat in the upper gallery of the Elon Musk Theatre of Capital Allocation?”
Musk himself, already the world’s richest man, will become the world’s first trillionaire.
He’s currently worth $825-billion, with his SpaceX shares worth $542-billion. That will go through the roof when SpaceX lists, and a boy from Pretoria will – improbably – be the first person to make a trillion dollars.
Musk has taken the Mark Zuckerberg route and kept the bulk of the voting stock in his control – an equally whopping 82.4%.
SpaceX will become the seventh most valuable company on the S&P 500.
Given the AI frenzy that has preceded the SpaceX mania, Nvidia is the most valuable at $5.2-trillion.
Meanwhile, some 4,400 SpaceX employees are set to become millionaires, the New York Times reports.
When Trevor Hise finished college in 2011, he ignored his parents’ insistence to work at General Electric, opting instead to work at a rocket startup. His windfall will be $13.5-million.
“The magnitude of this has been ridiculous,” the 37-year-old told the Times, and “now considers himself semiretired”.
Good thing he didn’t take his parents’ advice.
