SpaceX’s historic public debut is set to mint billions of dollars for Elon Musk’s close friends and longtime backers – even as it creates a new class of millionaires among rank-and-file SpaceX workers.
Among the latter is Juan Hernandez, a former SpaceX welder who took a $28-an-hour job with the company in 2015 after immigrating from Mexico – and who now is poised to rake in $880,000 from Friday’s IPO at $135 a share, according to the Wall Street Journal.
With the stock trading north of $170 as of Friday afternoon, 42-year-old Hernandez’s stake was worth north of $1 million.
“I didn’t even know what SpaceX was when my friend was talking about it” in the 2010s, Hernandez told the paper.
On the other end of the spectrum, Antonio Gracias, Musk’s 55-year-old close friend and a longtime Tesla investor, reaped a jaw-dropping $68 billion, with his firm Valor Equity Partners being SpaceX’s second-largest shareholder.
Shares of SpaceX opened at $150 each on their first day of trading Friday in the largest IPO ever. They quickly rocketed as high as $176.52, raising the company’s market cap well above $2 trillion – and instantly crowning Musk as the world’s first trillionaire.
Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund was one of the earliest investors in SpaceX, plowing $600 million into the company in 2008.
Now, that slug is worth $50 billion. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz’s venture capital firm’s stake is now worth more than $10 billion, while Sequoia Capital’s is valued at $20 billion.
But the IPO is also expected to transform more than 4,400 current and former SpaceX employees into overnight millionaires – with about 400 expected to earn $100 million or more, according to an analysis by Hill.com earlier reported by the New York Times.
Few SpaceX employees embody the company’s meteoric rise better than Trevor Hise, who accepted an internship at SpaceX in 2011 against the advice of his parents, who urged him to take a role at General Electric instead.
“At the time, there was very much the sentiment that SpaceX was an unproven start-up that wouldn’t last very long,” Hise told The New York Times.
The gamble paid off.
Over his 12 years at SpaceX as a launch engineer, Hise accumulated more than 100,000 shares – occasionally selling portions to pay for milestones like his wedding and a down payment on a home.
But the remainder of his stake is worth at least $13.5 million based on IPO price, the Times said.
“The magnitude of this has been ridiculous,” said Hise, 37, who now considers himself semi-retired after leaving SpaceX in 2023 and working as a real estate investor.
Hise said he and his wife, an artist, have hired a financial planner and are creating a foundation to give away some of their newfound riches. As for the parents who once worried he was passing up a stable career for a risky startup?
“They’re very proud,” Hise told the newspaper.
J. André Lavoie, 63, a former SpaceX engineer, is holding a stake valued at more than $28 million. He’s using it to finish renovating a hotel in northern Italy he bought after moving overseas five years ago, according to the Journal.
He also fantasizes about using some of his new wealth to help the Italian town where he lives switch from wood-burning to clean heating options – adding, “I don’t want to just die with a pile of money in the bank.”
Gavin Petit, 42, a former SpaceX engineer who oversaw launches, is holding onto more than 50,000 shares – enough to make him several million dollars, according to the Times.
SpaceX’s debut is “the Coca-Cola or Google IPO of my time,” said Petit, comparing it to winning the lottery – after he chose to take his company bonuses in more shares over the years, largely considered a risky move.
After joining the company, Hernandez received company stock valued at roughly $10,000 and continued buying additional shares through payroll deductions – at times selling some of his holdings to purchase Texas real estate and start a small business with his wife.
“It’s put me in a comfortable position for life,” said Hernandez, who left SpaceX last year and now works for Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ rival space firm.
Stockholders will be unable to sell their pre-IPO shares for a few months during a lockup period meant to prevent a massive outpouring, though some employees could be able to sell a small portion of shares as soon as July.
“Nobody could have expected this 20 years ago,” Justin Fishner-Wolfson, who has been building up shares in SpaceX for more than 15 years, told the Times.
In 2008, then a 26-year-old junior employee at Thiel’s Founders Fund, Fishner-Wolfson was assigned to check in on their new investment at SpaceX – where he watched a live video feed of the company’s third reusable rocket launch attempt crash and burst into flames.
His own venture capital firm, 137 Ventures, has been amassing SpaceX shares since 2011 and has not sold any stock. It now owns more than 1% of SpaceX, worth roughly $20 billion.
“This will most likely define my career,” he told the Times.
