Larry Ellison, Jack Dorsey and a Saudi Prince: The Surprise Winners of Spacex's IPO

SpaceX completed the largest initial public offering in American corporate history. Shares were priced at $135 each. The stock closed up roughly 19% on its first trading day at approximately $160.95, then another 20% on the second trading day to close at $229.40.

The headline number was staggering. SpaceX raised $75 billion by selling 555.6 million shares, and its market capitalisation settled at approximately $2.2 trillion at the close of opening-day trading, placing the company among the most valuable publicly traded entities on earth. Retail investors alone submitted more than $100 billion in orders.

Musk's 42% stake in SpaceX pushed his net worth past $1 trillion, making him, according to Forbes, the first individual in recorded history to cross that threshold. That story was real and it was enormous. But he wasn't the only big winner from SpaceX's initial public offering (IPO), and several of those names weren't the ones most investors would have predicted.

Larry Ellison, Jack Dorsey, and a Saudi Prince: The Unexpected Stakeholders

Larry Ellison, the co-founder and executive chairman of Oracle, held a 0.15% stake in SpaceX at the time of the IPO. At a $1.8 trillion valuation, that position was worth approximately $2.7 billion, according to figures reported by Forbes, placing Ellison among the nine individuals whose SpaceX holdings crossed the billionaire threshold on listing day. Ellison, who has maintained a long personal and professional relationship with Musk, had invested in SpaceX privately before any public market existed for the shares.

Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, the social media platform now operating as X under Musk, and the co-founder and chief executive of Block, also appeared on the list of SpaceX stakeholders who cleared the billion-dollar mark. Dorsey's path to a SpaceX position ran through his proximity to Musk in Silicon Valley and through private funding rounds that preceded the IPO by years.

One name that may not have been easy to guess is Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud. The Saudi Arabian billionaire investor and founder of Kingdom Holding Company held a 0.28% stake in SpaceX, the largest percentage position among the nine newly minted billionaires outside Musk's inner circle. At the IPO valuation, that stake was worth approximately $5 billion, according to Forbes. Prince Alwaleed has a long history of high-profile technology bets, including early positions in Twitter and Apple, and his SpaceX holding fits a pattern of placing capital in transformative American technology companies.

Forbes reported that the IPO produced nine new billionaires in total from SpaceX shareholdings, though the publication did not name every individual on that list at the time of initial reporting.

Antonio Gracias, Ron Baron, and the Early-Bet Payoff

Among the biggest percentage winners on a return-on-investment basis were two figures whose SpaceX involvement predated the company's rise to cultural ubiquity.

Antonio Gracias, the founder of Valor Equity Partners, a Chicago-based private equity and venture capital firm, had accumulated approximately 503 million shares in SpaceX across years of early-stage investment. At an IPO-era valuation of $68 billion attributed to Gracias's position by Inc. magazine, his stake represented one of the largest individual shareholder positions outside Musk himself. Gracias has served on the boards of several Musk-affiliated companies and was among the earliest institutional believers in the SpaceX model when commercial spaceflight was still widely regarded as speculative.

Ron Baron, the founder of Baron Capital Group, committed approximately $2 billion of his firm's capital to SpaceX through private placements before the IPO. Baron Capital has publicly championed the SpaceX investment in shareholder communications for years. The IPO converted that long-held conviction into a publicly priced return that could be marked to market for the first time.

The 4,400 Employees Who Became Millionaires

Beyond the billionaire tier, the SpaceX IPO generated a broader redistribution of wealth that reached deep into the company's workforce. Approximately 4,400 current and former SpaceX employees became millionaires as a result of the listing. That figure reflected the company's longstanding practice of compensating engineers, technicians, and operational staff with equity alongside cash salaries.

The 19% first-day price increase amplified those gains significantly. An employee holding shares that priced at $135 saw those same shares close the first day at roughly $160.95, a single-day increase that, across thousands of individual equity accounts, translated into billions of dollars in aggregate new wealth.

SpaceX carries major contracts with NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the U.S. Department of Defense, relationships that underpinned investor confidence in the company's revenue base ahead of the listing. The company's Starlink satellite internet service, which operates a constellation of thousands of low-Earth orbit satellites, and its Starship mega-rocket program provided additional growth narratives that retail and institutional investors priced into the offering.