Tech
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With SpaceX IPO, Elon Musk is the world’s first trillionaire — but he mostly lives in a tiny home in south Texas. ‘There is no food in the fridge’
SpaceX stock is now public, cementing CEO Elon Musk’s status as the first trillionaire in history. But despite being the world’s richest person, he spends most of his time in a modest home near SpaceX headquarters. The rocket and satellite company raised $75 billion on Thursday in the largest IPO ever after offering more than…
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Elon’s wealth: 1 trillion dollar bills would stretch 97 million miles, to the moon and back over 200x
Catapulted by the market debut of his rocket company SpaceX, Elon Musk could become the world’s first trillionaire by the end of the day. That level of wealth, all owned by just one person, was once unfathomable. Before Friday, the trillion dollar mark was reserved for measures like the GDP (or staggering debt ) of…
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Elon Musk’s wealth could double the economy of his native South Africa as world’s first trillionaire
Catapulted by the market debut of his rocket company SpaceX, Elon Musk could become the world’s first trillionaire by the end of the day. That level of wealth, all owned by just one person, was once unfathomable. Before Friday, the trillion dollar mark was reserved for measures like the GDP (or staggering debt ) of…
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For SpaceX CFO Bret Johnsen, the challenge starts after the $75 billion IPO
Good morning. Elon Musk is the face of SpaceX but behind the scenes, Bret Johnsen has spent more than a decade turning Musk’s ambitions into a financial story investors can underwrite. Johnsen joined as CFO in 2011 after senior finance roles at Mindspeed Technologies and Broadcom. “I tell people it’s hard to be a space…
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SpaceX’s first employee, Tom Mueller, thinks the historic IPO is just the beginning
The guy who built SpaceX’s engines has thoughts on its IPO. Tom Mueller was employee No. 1 at SpaceX. He built the engines behind the Falcon 9 rocket that rewrote the economics of getting to orbit. Now, he runs Impulse Space, valued at $4.26 billion, which designs and manufactures space vehicles that move satellites from…
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SpaceX’s IPO could be largest in history. Here’s how it compares to previous record-holders
SpaceX is shooting for the stars: a record-breaking $135 per share initial public offering that would value the company at $1.77 trillion. This is about seven-and-a-half times Alibaba’s inflation-adjusted valuation in 2014, which held the record before, and 15 times Facebook’s IPO, blowing modern service giants Uber and Airbnb out of the water entirely. SpaceX…
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SpaceX lowballed its bankers on fees. Goldman Sachs has another way to win big
It’s been widely reported that SpaceX will provide its underwriters a “gross spread” of just 0.75% or less for shepherding the biggest initial public offering of all time. According to Jay Ritter, a professor at the University of Florida who’s the nation’s top academic expert in the field, that number ties the lowest percentage on…
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Silicon Valley insiders warn U.S. defense supply chain is unprepared for modern warfare
To compete with China, the U.S. defense industry must leverage private venture capital and dual-use technologies to overhaul the defense playbook in the age of AI. That is a point that leading technology executives and venture capitalists drove home in a wide-ranging discussion at this year’s Fortune Brainstorm Tech summit in Aspen, Colorado. The U.S.…
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Abridge wants to be the operating system for medicine—and NVIDIA and Eli Lilly are helping build it
On Thursday morning in New York City, Dr. Shiv Rao stood before a room of health system executives and made a case that ambient AI—a technology that began largely as a transcription tool—was ready to do something far more consequential than writing a doctor’s notes. Abridge, the startup Rao cofounded in 2018, announced a strategic…
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As SpaceX goes public, a $100 billion shadow market faces a reckoning
A day ahead of the spectacle of SpaceX’s IPO, the much-anticipated trillion-plus valuation of the company—a Frankensteined creature of Elon Musk’s dreams and realities—is emerging as an investor Rorschach test. Some will see cosmic potential, while others will see science-fiction red flags. But for one group of investors—those who purchased SpaceX stock on the overheated…