Remember when SpaceX was just a scrappy startup with a dream and a budget that made venture capitalists nervous? Well, those days are long gone. When Elon Musk took SpaceX public in June with a roughly $2 trillion valuation, something wild happened: thousands of regular employees—including production line workers and welders—suddenly found themselves sitting on seven-figure portfolios.
During a recent interview on “The Sean Hannity Show,” Musk dropped the kind of casual flex that only a guy worth a trillion dollars can pull off. When asked about a former SpaceX welder whose stock options had ballooned to over $1 million, Musk basically said, “Oh, that’s not special—we’re talking thousands of people here.” He explained that if you’d been grinding away on the production line since the early days, your equity stake was probably worth north of a million bucks by now.
This isn’t some accident or a happy coincidence. Musk has always been weirdly idealistic about this stuff. “I’ve always had the philosophy that everyone at the company should receive stock in the company, so that they can participate in the upside,” he said. It’s the kind of thing that sounds nice in theory but rarely actually happens at scale. Yet here we are.
The numbers are genuinely wild. Before the IPO, Andrew Benson from pre-IPO trading platform Hill Markets estimated that SpaceX’s public debut would create roughly 4,400 new millionaires and over 400 centimillionaires. That’s not a typo—400 people with nine-figure portfolios. For context, that’s more wealth creation than most countries see in a decade.
How’d SpaceX pull this off? Employees got stock options when they joined, at annual reviews, and when they got promoted. The company also held private liquidity events twice a year where workers could sell some holdings to investors or the company itself. It’s basically the opposite of the tech industry’s usual playbook, where equity is treated like a carrot dangled just out of reach.
The stock itself has been on a bit of a roller coaster. It IPO’d at $135, jumped to over $200 in the days after, then settled down to around $148 by mid-week. Still, even at those lower prices, anyone who’d been there for a few years is sitting pretty.
Meanwhile, SpaceX CEO Gwynne Shotwell and her husband decided to get philanthropic with their newfound wealth, donating roughly $300 million worth of SpaceX stock to Trump Accounts—a government program designed to give every American kid born between 2025 and 2028 a $1,000 head start. Even Trump gave them a shout-out on Truth Social.
But Musk’s not done dreaming. He’s talking about establishing a moon base within a decade and potentially sending humans to Mars in five years. If that happens, SpaceX’s current valuation might look quaint. And hey, those newly minted millionaires on the production line? They’ll be along for the ride.
