By T N Ashok
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. On June 12, 2026, the company pulled off a blockbuster initial public offering, selling about 5% of its shares at $135 apiece and raising roughly $75 billion.
That frenzy sent SpaceX’s market value soaring to around $1.77 trillion, instantly making Elon Musk – who controls roughly half the stock – the first person ever to breach a $1 trillion net worth threshold on paper. Headlines rang with marvels at this “trillionaire” status and visions of privatized Mars colonies.
But closer inspection tempers the euphoria. Much of Musk’s wealth is not liquid cash, but equity tied up in performance-based grants and non‑voting share classes. SpaceX’s own filings admit that many of its lofty projects – from solar-powered orbital data centres to “moon hotels” – depend on “unproven technologies”.
Research analysts warned the IPO valuation was “significantly overvalued,” pegging SpaceX’s reasonable worth at roughly $780 billion – less than half the trading-day valuation. In practical terms, this means Musk’s trillion-dollar title is more an accounting moment than cash in the bank. As one commentator quipped, investors are essentially buying a gigantic “Elon premium” – a bet on Musk’s future successes rather than on steady profits.
Muskonomics and his road to riches unprecedented in American business history. Musk’s journey from obscure entrepreneur to headline-making billionaire has been extraordinary. Born in South Africa, he immigrated to North America and, after a stint at Stanford, co-founded online ventures that he sold for hundreds of millions of dollars. He poured that capital into two audacious startups.
In 2002, Musk founded SpaceX to revolutionize rocketry, and in 2004 he invested in Tesla, becoming its chairman. By 2008 he had assumed Tesla’s CEO role, convinced that high-performance electric cars could spark an automotive revolution.
Indeed, under Musk’s leadership Tesla defied the skeptics: its Roadster and Model S made EVs glamorous and profitable, eventually sending Tesla’s market cap into the stratosphere. According to former GM vice chairman Bob Lutz, Musk “renewed the world’s respect for American ingenuity in automotive engineering”. Since Tesla went public in 2010, shareholders have seen astonishing returns (on the order of 20,000% through early 2026), effectively creating over $1.2 trillion in wealth for investors.
SpaceX was no less groundbreaking. Musk’s team mastered reusable rockets, slashing launch costs. In 2008 SpaceX became the first privately funded company to put a liquid-fuelled rocket into orbit, and soon won a NASA contract to service the International Space Station (ISS) – over $1 billion in funding for cargo and crew missions.
Over the next decade SpaceX alone carried astronauts to the ISS in its Dragon capsule and sent hundreds of satellites into orbit. The U.S. government (federal plus NASA) was effectively SpaceX’s first and largest customer. By the mid-2020s, SpaceX had accumulated tens of billions in government contracts: for example, NASA’s Commercial Crew and Artemis programs provided roughly $3.8 billion in 2024, and U.S. military launch contracts contributed hundreds of millions more.
Musk parlayed these successes into vast personal influence. Alongside SpaceX and Tesla, he launched brain‑computer interface startup Neuralink, tunnel-builder The Boring Company, and even acquired Twitter in 2022, giving him an outsized voice on tech and politics.
His ability to juggle so many ventures (some call them the “Muskonomy”) fuelled sky-high expectations. “Much like Tesla, SpaceX is a bet on Elon Musk,” noted one IPO strategist. A market cap in the $1.5–$2 trillion range is essentially “driven as much by faith in Musk’s vision as by traditional metrics,” i.e. an “Elon premium”.
Even JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon has praised him as “the Edison of our time”. In short, Musk has repeatedly turned near-impossible dreams into multi-billion-dollar reality – which is precisely why so many are willing to ride his coattails, despite nagging doubts.
Government support has been the rocket fuel behind much of Musk’s empire. SpaceX’s early breakthroughs came with Obama‑era seed money: NASA issued grants to multiple private firms (SpaceX and Boeing) to replace the shuttle for ISS access, and SpaceX won the commercial cargo and crew programs.
More recently, NASA awarded SpaceX an $2 billion-plus contract to develop the Starship lunar lander under Artemis (to return humans to the Moon), and in total SpaceX earned roughly $3.8 billion from NASA in FY2024 alone.
The U.S. Air Force and Space Force have also paid SpaceX hundreds of millions to launch military satellites. Even satellite division Starlink is in line for multi‑billion-dollar FAA and defense contracts for upgrading air traffic control and broadband in hard‑to‑serve areas.
Tesla, by contrast, has benefited mainly through incentives. It sells billions of dollars a year in regulatory credits – paid by legacy automakers to offset emissions – netting about $2.8 billion in 2024. And each Tesla buyer in the U.S. qualifies for up to a $7,500 federal tax credit, plus state EV incentives and solar energy tax breaks that boost Tesla Energy sales.
In effect, Tesla’s growth was subsidized both by regulation and by government purchases of EVs (even a $400 million armoured-car order once backed out). Industry analysts at JPMorgan estimate that the winding down of federal EV and solar credits could cost Tesla over $1 billion annually.
All of this changed when Musk’s politics clashed with those who hold the purse strings. In 2024, Musk had been a close Trump ally – he donated heavily to Trump’s campaign, led the brief “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) task force in the transition, and often praised the former president.
Trump, for his part, celebrated SpaceX achievements and vowed a new push for the Moon (even hosting Musk at the White House). But the détente broke in mid-2025. Musk vehemently criticized a $5 trillion tax-and-spending package backed by Trump as a “disgusting abomination,” particularly over the gutting of EV mandates.
Offended, Trump retaliated on his Truth Social platform: he hinted Musk might be cut off from federal favours unless he stopped “going crazy” and joked that the billionaire might have to “head back home to South Africa” if he kept fighting. In an earlier tweet, Trump even floated the idea of cancelling all Musk subsidies and contracts to save “billions and billions of dollars”.
This high-stakes threat loomed large. Suddenly SpaceX – the very nation’s workhorse to space – was being made a political pawn. Musk barked back on X (formerly Twitter), momentarily threatening to halt SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft operations before backing down under pressure.
Congressional allies like Rep. Thomas Massie quickly pointed out that without SpaceX, NASA would have no way to get crews to the ISS – “that’s ridiculous,” he quipped. NASA, for its part, insisted it would stay the course: “we will continue to work with our industry partners” (namely SpaceX) to meet mission goals, regardless of White House squabbles.
Even on the hard right, some figures took it further – provocateur Steve Bannon publicly labelled Musk an “illegal alien” and urged deportation – though such talk ultimately fizzled. By late 2025 the personal feud had cooled: Musk issued a mea culpa for his barbs, and both sides quietly waved off the worst threats.
The upshot is clear: Musk’s companies have enjoyed a lavish government subsidy regime, but it is not guaranteed. New political winds could reshape NASA’s budget or EV policies overnight. The era of easy, bipartisan support seems over; Musk will now have to win on performance.
In a sense, the peak SpaceX IPO valuation came just before Musk lost a key political patron (Trump, who lost the 2024 election) and before his younger brother Kimbal’s latest cannabis run-in drew censure. Against that backdrop, the headline “first trillionaire” comes with an asterisk: it relies on a status quo that may not last.
Meanwhile, Musk’s flagship automaker is facing headwinds. Its EV crown has slipped away. The same political shifts that cut subsidies also dented demand: U.S. EV sales fell after federal tax credits expired, and global growth slowed. In the crowded electric market, Tesla was no longer certain of leadership.
BYD, the Chinese battery-giant-turned-automaker, surged ahead in 2025. The company reported sales of about 2.0 million electrified vehicles (including plug-in hybrids), up 28% year-over-year, while Tesla’s own deliveries dipped to roughly 1.64 million cars, down about 8% from 2024. That shift allowed BYD to claim the title of world’s largest EV maker for the first time. (Notably, Tesla has never sold plug-in hybrids – its figure was all-battery EVs – so BYD’s lead partly reflects a broader lineup.)
Chinese tech companies are also muscling in. Huawei, for example, has partnered with state-owned automakers under the new HIMA (Harmony Intelligent Mobility Alliance) umbrella to sell battery-electric and hybrid cars. Goldman Sachs noted an explosive 568% week-over-week surge in HIMA orders after the Beijing Auto Show, underscoring how quickly Chinese-backed entries can disrupt the market.
This alliance aims to embed Huawei’s software expertise into vehicles, and its early models are winning consumers with high-tech features. In Europe and Asia, Tesla now faces intense competition from BYD, Geely, Nio and others (and even legacy brands like Volkswagen and BMW are rushing new EVs to counter Tesla’s lead).
All told, Musk’s car business is playing catch-up. Tesla has responded by cutting prices and introducing cheaper “Standard” trims of its Model 3/Y models. But the days of effortless growth seem over. Critics note that Musk’s focus has drifted toward future bets (robotaxis, humanoid robots, AI) at the expense of core vehicle development.
Still, Tesla has an army of loyal fans, and its factories worldwide (from Fremont to Shanghai to Texas) churn out EVs around the clock. The question is whether Musk can recapture momentum or at least sustain Tesla’s profitability in this new phase.
Is Musk facing Giant Leaps or Giant Leaks? With SpaceX now public, and Tesla under pressure, the spotlight turns to what comes next. Musk’s vision remains audacious: colonizing Mars, creating orbital internet constellations (Starlink), mining asteroids, even building a solar-powered data-grid in space.
His shareholders seem happy to buy the dream. In a livestream Q&A with JPMorgan’s CEO, Musk regaled investors with talk of “moon hotels, a future Martian colony and Earth-orbiting data centres powered by the sun.” He dodged details on AI’s path to profits, but leaned into satellites and Starship as the big narrative.
Yet the market will want to see fundamentals eventually. SpaceX already has real revenue and a backlog from launcher fees, Starlink subscriptions, and government contracts. It also has legacy costs (Starship development burn, billions spent so far).
By going public, SpaceX now has $75 billion in cash from the IPO (plus up to $11.2 billion more if the underwriters exercise the 15% greenshoe option). That war chest can fund decades of R&D without corporate borrowing. But to justify a multi-trillion valuation, SpaceX must execute on its lofty business plan – from saturating Earth with Starlink dishes to truly reusing Starships for regular lunar or Martian trips.
For NASA, SpaceX is still indispensable: Starship is the only vehicle slated to carry humans back to the Moon under Artemis III, and the Falcon series launches billions of dollars of missions each year.
Still, NASA is deliberately diversifying. Recent contracts for moon rovers and base modules have gone to Blue Origin and Astrobotic. Boeing’s SLS and Orion still fly, and the U.S. The Air Force is fostering small-launch startups. SpaceX cannot take its rolodex of contracts for granted, especially as national security and geopolitics shape space policy.
In sum, Musk stands at a crossroads: his legacy is dazzling – he did make reusable rockets and cool EVs, where others doubted. Now, markets have given him unprecedented confidence.
As one Wall Street veteran put it, “Elon is the Edison of our time.” But Edison’s lightbulb only lit after years of failed filaments. Musk still has to deliver on commercializing those filaments he’s selling – true self-driving cars, AI profits, and routine interplanetary launches – or face the reality of a very different bottom line.
For the moment, investors seem content to fuel the hype; whether SpaceX’s stock keeps soaring or rockets back to earth will test if the world’s first trillionaire of 2026 is a sign of enduring genius or just another boomlet on the rocket ride to nowhere. (IPA Service)
