As markets brace for what could become one of the most consequential public offerings in modern history, Elon Musk’s rocket giant SpaceX is preparing to generate staggering wealth—not only for its billionaire founder, but potentially for thousands of employees and investors.
The biggest fortunes will flow to executives and early insiders. Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell and Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen each hold stakes that could reportedly be worth more than $1 billion, according to the Financial Times. Antonio Gracias, a SpaceX director and founder of Valor Equity Partners, owns shares that could ultimately be worth some $65 billion, while another director, Luke Nosek, has a stake estimated at roughly $5 billion.
But wealth creation won’t be confined to the C-suite. Some 400 current and former SpaceX employees could see their stake worth soar to more than $100 million, according to an analysis by Hill.com, a San Francisco-based investment platform, first reported by The New York Times.
In total, more than 4,400 current and former SpaceX employees are expected to become millionaires in the IPO.
Unlike many recent IPOs—dominated by software startups and AI firms—SpaceX has constructed its empire in factories, launchpads, and manufacturing facilities as much as engineering labs. To become the world’s most dominant rocket company, Musk needed more than coders and executives. He needed welders, machinists, technicians, and manufacturing specialists by the thousands—many of whom were offered company stock as part of their compensation.
Juan Hernandez is one example. A former SpaceX welder who joined the company in 2015 earning $28 an hour, the Mexico-native is sitting on shares now worth roughly $880,000 at the anticipated IPO price of $135, according to The Wall Street Journal.
SpaceX’s IPO: a moment for the skilled trades, or a shift in financial risk?
SpaceX’s IPO comes at a pivot moment around the future of work.
As artificial intelligence reshapes white-collar jobs and raises fears of workplace disruption, skilled trade roles—from welding and industrial maintenance to electrical work—have increasingly been viewed as among the least vulnerable to automation. At the same time, shortages of skilled labor have left employers scrambling to fill manufacturing and infrastructure jobs critical to the U.S. economy.
For some, the wealth potentially unlocked for thousands of skilled workers through SpaceX’s IPO represents something larger: validation that hands-on careers deserve the same respect often reserved for white-collar work.
Ruchir Shah, CEO of Skillcat—an online skilled trades training start-up—said SpaceX is helping expose a broader truth about the future economy: some of the hardest jobs to automate—and hardest workers to hire—may increasingly sit in the physical world.
“If you think about it, these are some of the most critical people for SpaceX to grow,” Shah told Fortune. “It’s just as hard to find good welders and good machinists as it is a software developer—if not harder because if there’s a massive shortage—so it makes sense that they were given equity.”
Still, while equity in a company with ambitious growth plans might sound lucrative, Jason Schloetzer—an associate professor of accounting at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business—cautioned against viewing SpaceX as evidence of a broad-based wave of skilled tradespeople suddenly accessing Silicon Valley-style wealth.
“Nothing that I can see in the filing suggests a novel blue-collar equity model,” he told Fortune. “This is largely venture-backed compensation attached to a company that happens to build rockets.”
If anything, Schloetzer said, SpaceX illustrates how more financial risk is being shifted onto workers. Rather than receiving guaranteed compensation, many workers appear to participate through employee stock purchase plans—programs that allow employees to buy discounted shares using deductions from their own paychecks rather than stock simply handed to them.
“The traditional industrial model paid skilled labor through pensions, profit-sharing, and union-negotiated packages where employers carried much of the uncertainty,” Schloetzer said. “Equity changes that risk profile.”
And even for workers sitting on valuable equity, paper wealth does not always translate into immediate cash. Lockup periods can limit when employees are able to sell, stock prices can fluctuate sharply after an IPO, and taxes can eat into gains.
“Equity worth millions on paper is not millions in the bank,” Schloetzer said.
Elon Musk has the most to gain from SpaceX’s IPO—but trillionaire status is far from guaranteed
The biggest winner of the SpaceX IPO will be Musk. Already the world’s richest person with $700 billion to his name, Musk owns roughly 43% of SpaceX—which merged with xAi earlier this year—meaning a successful public debut could push his net worth beyond the $1 trillion mark.
For critics of rising inequality, that possibility represents something far larger than a blockbuster IPO. According to Nabil Ahmed, Oxfam America’s senior director of economic justice, any employee windfall would likely pale in comparison to the extraordinary gains expected to accrue to Musk, warning the offering could intensify already historic levels of wealth concentration.
“We’re running out of adjectives to describe the frightening scale of wealth concentration that we see in this moment,” Ahmed told Fortune, calling the potential accumulation of wealth “a shocking and frightening moment for our economy, for our society, for our democracy.”
The concern, Ahmed added, extends beyond Musk’s personal fortune to the increasingly intertwined role his companies play in American life. SpaceX has become a major contractor for both NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense, while xAI is positioning itself as a key player in the race to build advanced artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Still, the enormous wealth projects surrounding SpaceX are far from guaranteed. The IPO aims to raise $75 billion by selling 555.6 million shares at $135 per share, bringing the company’s total valuation to $1.75 trillion. And some financial analysts have argued the company’s anticipated valuation may already be priced in years of technological breakthroughs that have yet to materialize. Investment research firm Morningstar recently valued SpaceX at roughly $63 per share—more than 50% below its anticipated $135 IPO price.
“Even at $63 per share, we give SpaceX a lot of benefit of the doubt in two of the three scenarios, in which we assume the company can achieve a rapidly reusable Starship rocket enabling multiple launches per week and successfully commercialize data centers in space,” Mornstar equity analyst Nicolas Owens wrote. “Neither of these engineering problems has been solved, and we don’t expect them to be until at least 2028.”
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