Tech mogul Elon Musk has officially become the world’s first trillionaire, as his company SpaceX began trading on the Nasdaq on Friday after launching its initial public offering. Musk, wearing a leather jacket and flanked by senior SpaceX employees, rang the opening bell Friday morning, receiving extensive coverage on CNBC.
SpaceX began trading a few hours later, rising 18% from its IPO price to $154 per share, pushing Musk over the $1 trillion hump.
Musk is the CEO of SpaceX, but also of a number of other companies, including Tesla. While his plans are grand (SpaceX told investors “we believe we have identified the largest fully addressable market (TAM) in human history”), his ambitions across media, communications, and entertainment are real, and he now has more wealth than anyone else on the planet (and beyond) to implement them.
SpaceX is a growing player in broadband internet with its Starlink service, threatening telecom giants like Comcast, Charter, Verizon and AT&T, and its xAI division is still developing video models through Grok, a business line of obvious interest to Hollywood. X (formerly Twitter) continues to attract interest and intends to secure more ad dollars and subscriptions in the coming years.
“We believe the common public company mantra of underpromising and overdelivering has never been uttered in the halls of a Musk-run company,” Wolff Research analyst Peter Supino wrote on Friday. “He sets big, bold goals and then pushes his organizations to work toward them, even if it seems impossible.” “We expect this stock to be largely driven by a compelling thematic/story line, where if investors believe long-term disruptive potential, near-term valuation will matter less.”
Although Musk has been leading his multiple companies, he has also served as a culture warrior, criticizing Christopher Nolan’s casting choices in the film. Odyssey He often targets what he sees as “woke” politics and viewpoints coming out of Hollywood.
But he’s also close to some powerful players in Hollywood, perhaps most notably Ari Emanuel, CEO of WME Group and CEO of TKO, and Larry Ellison, who is backing his son David Ellison’s $110 billion deal for Warner Bros. Discovery. Emanuel has been an investor in SpaceX, with Page Six reporting that Brian Lord, Mark Burnett and Michael Caves are also investing.
However, Musk’s vast wealth (The Walt Disney Company’s market cap is $175 billion, Netflix’s market cap is $340 billion) heralds a new era of control, one that makes golden-age Hollywood heavyweights look small by comparison, even though Musk seems to recognize the role culture plays in shifting public opinion.
