CALGARY — Elon Musk has become the world’s first trillionaire as SpaceX’s stock began trading Friday morning on the Nasdaq at $150 per share.Shares of the company jumped more than 21% in early trading, and the company now has a nearly $2 trillion market cap, with Forbes reporting the IPO has boosted Musk’s personal fortune to $1.1 trillion.Musk owns 4.8 billion shares of SpaceX worth $715 billion and also has 350 million stock options worth $50 billion, totaling a 38% stake in the company.He also cannot sell his shares in SpaceX for 366 days.In a video interview on the Musk-owned social media platform X, the trillionaire told JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon that people had told him he should take SpaceX public for the last ten years and that he’s doing it now because the company is planning to put 100,000 next-generation Starlink satellites into orbit.Earlier on Friday, Musk made remarks at the SpaceX headquarters in southern Texas saying that he gave the company “less than a 10% chance of succeeding at all” when it first started and now it’s going public “with the biggest IPO ever.”SpaceX officials celebrated the ceremonial start of trading at events at the Texas headquarters and at the Nasdaq in New York City, where both Musk and SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell rang the opening bell.From a personal standpoint, Musk first appeared on Forbes’ annual list of the world’s billionaires in 2012 as the 634th-richest person in the world with an estimated $2 billion fortune.Nine years later, he surpassed Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as the world’s richest person in January 2021.However, in order for Musk to now maintain his new status as a trillionaire, the stock price cannot fall below $138.At the time of publication, SpaceX was trading around $170.
