Co-Founder, Technoking of Tesla, Chief Executive Officer & Director, Tesla
Watch The Moment Elon Musk Becomes World's First Trillionaire As SpaceX Has Biggest IPO In History
On Friday, SpaceX was listed on the Nasdaq in the biggest IPO ever, turning Elon Musk into the world's first-ever trillionaire.
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About Elon Musk
Elon Musk recently oversaw SpaceX’s public listing on the Nasdaq on June 12, 2026, which he said was the largest initial public offering in the history of capital markets. During the event, Musk stated that he had originally given SpaceX “less than a 10% chance of succeeding at all” and recalled telling people, “Look, we’re probably going to fail, but you know, we should give it a try because if we don’t… we will never be a truly spacefaring civilization.” He described SpaceX’s mission as “to take the fiction out of science fiction” and said the company aims to make humanity multi-planetary, adding, “We want to be able to take anyone who wants to go to the moon, anyone who wants to go to Mars… not just a few astronauts.” The IPO was widely reported to have made Musk the world’s first trillionaire. In addition to the IPO, Musk discussed SpaceX’s plans to build AI satellites and space-based data centers. In an interview with SpaceX employees in Bastrop, Texas, he said that the company’s AI satellite is “actually much simpler than a Starlink satellite” and noted that the current reference design calls for Nvidia Rubin chips. He also spoke about a “terrafab” facility that he said would be approximately 100 million square feet, roughly 10 times the size of Tesla’s Gigafactory Texas, and discussed using a mass driver on the moon to launch materials into deep space. Separately, Musk oversaw the final delivery of Tesla’s Model S and Model X vehicles, which he called a “bittersweet moment,” emphasizing that those cars “showed that an electric car could actually be the best car of any period.”
Transcript (15 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Narrator0:07
2 one.
We have liftoff confirmed. Falcon 1 is airborne at this time. We are hearing from the launch control center that there has been an anomaly on the vehicle.
America has launched, and with it the ambitions of a new generation continuing the dream.
Stage one FTS stage one entry. Start it.
You think of Starlink as really getting to the parts of the world that are the most difficult to reach.
This day heralds a new age of space exploration.
Space station and the first to return astronauts to orbit from American soil. Last year alone, SpaceX completed 165 orbital launches, a record for any single launch operator in history. Starlink connects more than 12 million subscribers across 164 countries, leveraging approximately 9,600 satellites in low Earth orbit, bringing high-speed internet to communities that no terrestrial infrastructure has ever reached. And SpaceX AI is advancing artificial intelligence to strengthen SpaceX's space and connectivity platforms, transforming data into actionable intelligence at a global scale. The company begins trading today on NASDAQ under the ticker SPCX in what stands as the largest public offering in the history of capital markets.
As the home of innovation and the home of the innovation economy, NASDAQ is incredibly proud to be SpaceX's partner as it builds the physical and digital infrastructure of the future. Your mission is now backed by the financial engines of the public markets with access to every investor everywhere. Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team. We cannot wait to see what comes next. And now, please join me in welcoming SpaceX's president and chief operating officer, Gwynne Shotwell, for her opening remarks.
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Gwynne Shotwell5:50
Good morning everybody. I am so excited to be here today. We make history again. We have a history of making history. So, I want everyone to know that we did open this morning in a rather exciting way. We launched Falcon 9, launched Starlink satellites to orbit. So, what company would do such a thing on the day that they open in the public market? SpaceX would.
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Elon Musk6:22
Right.
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Gwynne Shotwell6:25
I am so proud of this team. Today we're 24. We're not today. This year we are 24 years old. Elon founded this company in 2002 initially to build rockets and spaceships that will take humans to Mars, the moon, and even beyond. We've done we've not quite gotten to Mars. We're almost at the moon, but let's just quickly run through the amazing things that you guys have accomplished. 2008, six weeks after a failure of Flight 3 Falcon 1, we got the first liquid fueled rocket to orbit from a private company. Yay. Yay. By the way, I should have prefaced this with everyone said we could never get to orbit. Check. But it was a little rocket. Then it's everyone said, 'Well, you can't get a real rocket to orbit.' Two years later, we got a real rocket to orbit. Falcon 9. Oh, well, you'll never you'll never get to the space station because that's what we really want to do, right? We want to take humans outside the bounds of Earth, but you'll never get astronauts to the space station. Check. We did that, too. Doubters, right? Oh, you'll never fly Falcon 9 enough. You'll never get to production. 165 launches last year. Check. You'll never build a rocket large enough to take humans to the moon and Mars. We build one. We've flown it. And this year, I believe we'll get to orbit with that vehicle. And we'll recover the first the second stage. We've already recovered the first stage and reflown it. So, good good on you all for that, too. With the merger, the acquisition of xAI, we now as a group own the largest coherent gigawatt class compute on the planet, which will help us truth seek and understand the universe. So, congratulations to all of us for that. So, we're about 22,000 strong. I'm super proud that over half of us actually bought additional stock in this opening totaling almost a billion dollars.
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Elon Musk8:48
So, thank you for that, too.
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Gwynne Shotwell8:51
But really the thank yous go to all of you for hanging in there for keeping a straight spine as the doubters doubt to achieve historic things sometimes every day multiple times a week. Thank you all of you for doing this and I hope today is a day that you feel great about and that you're celebrating. Take a moment. Now, the Falcon Recovery Team can't take a moment today. But everybody else can and I hope Falcon Recovery Team could take a moment a little bit later. Yeah. And also, thank you to the families, the partners, the plus ones, the children, the brothers, the sisters, the parents that have lived through long nights, that have seen launch failures, that have seen AI compute go down, that have seen kind of the trials and tribulations of this incredibly difficult business. Thank you so much for hanging in there. I know I can't do this without my incredible partner and husband too. And I know you all have been a great source of support for all the SpaceX team and you are a huge part of this success too. So thank you for that. I haven't mentioned Starlink and Starlink Mobile yet. We're probably connected through that. So incredible team to do that connecting those that are unconnected and I'm really excited about the future of that. In fact, as I was meeting with like literally almost a thousand people in person over the last two weeks and almost a hundred thousand through telecommunications hopefully on Starlink. What was clear to me as I was talking about the future and they were asking questions about what we'd achieved and what we're going to achieve. What was clear to me is that we are just beginning. It might feel like a long haul, but it's going to be even more exciting going forward. So, thank you again. I want to introduce my boss of 24 years, the chairman of this incredible company, the CEO of this incredible company, and the chief designer of this incredible company, Mr. Elon Musk, who is in Starbase, Texas, and he's celebrating there with four or five thousand people. Thank you so much.
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Elon Musk11:45
All right. Up. Well, thank you, Gwen. Gwynne Shotwell has been an incredible partner. And was one of the first people to join the company. So thank you, Gwen. Oh, she's in New York, of course. Where is she? And yeah, it is certainly hard to believe that little company that started in a warehouse in El Segundo is now going public with the largest IPO ever. And let me tell you, if people had told me this was gonna happen, I was like, 'Man, you must be smoking some really good crack because I think this company's going to fail.' I mean, I gave SpaceX less than a 10% chance of succeeding at all, to be clear. In fact, I told people this. I said, 'Look, we're probably going to fail, but you know, we should give it a try because if we don't, if there's not a new company that enters space, we will never be a truly space bearing civilization.' You know, while the other aerospace companies, they build good rockets and everything, they were simply not pursuing the technology that's necessary to make life multiplanetary. To make Star Trek, to make the exciting science fiction futures that we've read about real. And that's what SpaceX is all about is to take the fiction out of science fiction and create an exciting, inspiring future for everyone. We want to be able to take anyone who wants to go to the moon, anyone who wants to go to Mars or anywhere in the solar system and maybe beyond the solar system at some point. We want to be able to take you there. Not just a few astronauts. I mean you literally, if you're watching, whoever you are watching this, SpaceX wants to be able to take you to the moon, take you to Mars, and ultimately beyond. And I'm confident at this point that with the incredible team that we have here at SpaceX that we will do that for you. I always think about this. There are always problems on earth. There are always problems on earth. There always things that we wish to be better that we want to solve here on Earth and we should solve them. But there also have to be things that get you excited about the future that make you glad to wake up in the morning because you can't wait to see what happens next. And that's the future that SpaceX wants to bring to you.
Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Come on. Come on. Thank you. And I think it's going to be a long time. My mind think I am at home. Oh no no no. I'm a rocket man. Rocket man burning on his hel and I think it's going to be a long long time again. Papa man think I am no longer. Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids. In fact, it's cold as hell. And there's no one there to raise them. If you did,