STARBASE, Texas — He stood before a room full of cheering employees on Friday, June 12, the morning his company made history, and Elon Musk said the thing nobody expected him to say.
He admitted he never believed it would work.
“I gave SpaceX less than a 10% chance of succeeding at all,” Musk told the crowd, speaking by video from SpaceX’s Starbase headquarters in Texas as the company prepared to go public on the Nasdaq.
It was a startling confession for a man about to become the richest person who has ever lived. By the end of the morning, Musk would be the world’s first trillionaire.
Back when he started the company in 2002, he told friends the truth as he saw it. The odds were terrible. The company would probably fail.
But he believed it was worth trying anyway because if no one tried, humanity would never reach beyond Earth.
He laughed Friday as he remembered how impossible this day once seemed. If someone had described this moment to him back then, he said, he would have thought they were out of their mind.
For anyone who has ever been told their dream was foolish, his story landed close to home.
The early years nearly broke him.
SpaceX’s first three rockets failed, one after another, between 2006 and 2008. The money was almost gone. The company was one more failure away from disappearing entirely.
Then the fourth rocket reached orbit, and everything changed.
That single success became the foundation for everything that followed.
Reusable rockets that land themselves.
Starlink, the satellite internet network now beaming service to remote corners of the world.
Astronauts carried to the International Space Station.
And finally, the biggest stock market debut anyone has ever seen.
The numbers are almost hard to comprehend.
SpaceX raised about $75 billion on Friday, the largest IPO in history. Shares opened at $150 and climbed past $160, lifting the company’s value above $2 trillion.
Musk’s personal fortune crossed the trillion-dollar mark, a figure no human being has ever held.
But the people in that room were not only watching one man get richer.
They were watching their own lives change, too.
Thousands of SpaceX employees — the engineers, welders, technicians, and dreamers who stayed through the lean years — woke up Friday holding stock worth real money.
By some estimates, roughly 4,400 employees became millionaires the moment trading began.
Standing in for Musk at the Nasdaq in New York was Gwynne Shotwell, the company’s president and the seventh person he ever hired.
She has spent more than two decades helping turn Musk’s ambitious ideas into rockets that actually fly.
Beside her was Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen.
Together they rang the opening bell while their founder watched from Texas, surrounded by the team that built what once seemed impossible.
The Musk family turned out for the milestone as well.
His mother, Maye Musk, was among the first to arrive at the Nasdaq site in Times Square, there to witness her son reach a height few parents could ever imagine.
For everyday Americans, Friday offered something rare: a chance to own a small piece of the story.
SpaceX set aside a significant portion of its shares for retail investors through brokerages including Fidelity, Charles Schwab, and SoFi.
People who had only ever read about Musk could, for the first time, become shareholders in his company.
He ended his remarks the way he often does — looking forward rather than backward.
The whole point of SpaceX, he said, was to take science fiction and turn it into a future worth getting excited about.
He spoke about carrying ordinary people to the Moon and to Mars — not just astronauts, but anyone who wants to go.
It was a long way from the warehouse where it all began, and from the founder who once figured the odds were stacked against him.
On Friday, the man who gave his company less than a 10% chance stood at the top of the world, proof that sometimes the long shot is the one worth taking.
JBizNews Desk — Technology
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