The technology mogul Elon Musk has officially become the world’s first trillionaire, with his company SpaceX beginning to trade on the NASDAQ exchange Friday after launching its IPO. Musk, clad in a leather jacket and surrounded by senior SpaceX employees, rang the opening bell Friday morning, garnering wall-to-wall coverage on CNBC.
SpaceX began trading a couple hours later, rising by 18 percent from its IPO price to $154 per share, pushing Musk over the trillion dollar hump.
Musk is CEO of SpaceX, but also of a number of other companies, including Tesla. While his plans are grandiose (SpaceX told investors “we believe we have identified the largest actionable total addressable market (‘TAM’) in human history”), his ambitions that touch the media, telecom and entertainment space are real, and he now has more wealth than any other person on the planet (and beyond) to execute on that.
SpaceX is a growing player in broadband internet through its Starlink service, threatening telecom giants like Comcast, Charter, Verizon and AT&T, and his xAI division is still developing video models through Grok, a business line of obvious interest to Hollywood. X (formerly Twitter) continues to garner attention and intends to secure more advertising and subscription dollars in the coming years.
