Elon Musk's fortune crossed this symbolic threshold for the first time thanks to SpaceX's IPO. He became the first billionaire in history.

SpaceX shares soared on the New York Stock Exchange on Friday for the first steps of this historic listing, launching the fortune of its boss Elon Musk, who became the first to cross the symbolic threshold of $1 trillion.

Around 4:45 p.m., the stock was trading at $167.95, a 24% increase from the initially set price.

This confirms the enthusiasm of investors for this extraordinary operation, thanks to which Elon Musk's jewel has raised no less than $75 billion, triple the record held since 2019 by the oil company Saudi Aramco.

"SpaceX wants to be able to take you to the Moon, to Mars and, eventually, even further, and I am confident that with the incredible team we have here at SpaceX, we will achieve this for you," Musk assured earlier today from the group's headquarters in Starbase, Texas.

The businessman reposted on X – a social network owned by SpaceX – several images of bankers wearing green shoes bearing his company's name.

In Wall Street parlance, this refers to a surge in interest in an initial public offering (IPO), which allows a company to raise more money than initially anticipated. In SpaceX's case, the total could reach as high as $86 billion.

The group is now valued at $1.765 trillion, making it one of the ten largest market capitalizations in the world.

"I'll buy a share as soon as it's listed, just to see how it goes. People want to be part of what Elon Musk is building," Adam Ennis, 35, a wealth management advisor, told an AFP journalist earlier in the day.

Like him, about a hundred people gathered Friday morning in front of the Nasdaq buildings in Times Square (New York), where giant screens broadcast advertisements for SpaceX.

With this listing, Elon Musk's fortune crossed the $1 trillion mark for the first time on Friday, almost the sum of the wealth produced in a year by countries like Switzerland or Poland.

The serial entrepreneur has almost tripled his fortune since the end of 2024 and far surpasses his competitors.

"One trillion dollars in the hands of one man is incompatible not only with a fair economy but also with a healthy democracy," commented Nabil Ahmed of the NGO Oxfam in the United States.

Earlier in the week, Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren called on the market regulator, the SEC, to suspend SpaceX's IPO while it conducts checks to ensure that investors are not being deceived.

She had notably highlighted the "unprecedented" power that Elon Musk possesses.

The world's richest man will retain the bulk of SpaceX's voting rights, while controlling only about 42% of the company's capital.

Heading to Mars

For its initial public offering, the group decided to pamper individual investors by reserving a significant portion of the new shares for them.

Many of them subscribe to Elon Musk's vision of a multifaceted conglomerate, heterogeneous for some, encompassing rockets, artificial intelligence (AI), chips, satellite internet and social network.

What Elon Musk is selling to investors, much more than the activities that already bring in money, like the Falcon launcher or the Starlink internet network, is a potential and markets that do not yet exist, like that of data centers in space.

No other company of this size talks about colonizing the Moon or Mars like SpaceX does.

"Sending passengers to the Moon and Mars, not just astronauts, energy production and asteroid mining, all these things (...) were largely science fiction," George Nield of the consulting firm Commercial Space Technologies told AFP.

He is very optimistic about the future of private space industries, and believes he has "enough evidence" to see these ambitions "realized in the near future."