Pedestrians walk in Times Square with screens showing visuals of Elon Musk and SpaceX branding at the Nasdaq MarketSite Exchange in Times Square on Friday in New York City. Elon Musk celebrated the Nasdaq opening bell Friday as SpaceX prepared to start trading publicly and possibly cementing his status as a trillionaire. UPI-Yonhap
NEW YORK — The world’s richest man just became its first trillionaire.
Shares in Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX soared 25 percent after opening for trading at noon Friday, an auspicious start for history's biggest initial public offering and enough to push the net worth of its founder and CEO over the trillion dollar mark.
The shares opened at $150, then shot to $168.90 around 12:.50 p.m. ET. That price gave the company a market value of $2.21 trillion. Musk, who also is a major shareholder and CEO of Tesla, is now worth an estimated $1.1 trillion, according to Forbes.
Musk says SpaceX, founded in 2002, is going public now because it needs money to fund its ambitions of putting satellites and data centers in space and eventually establishing a colony of people on Mars.
