Elon Musk becomes the world's first trillionaire

**Andrew Peach** (0:00)
The trillion-dollar man.

**Elon Musk** (0:02)
I give SpaceX less than a 10% chance of succeeding at all.

**Vincent Peters** (0:09)
Even at the current valuation, I still believe in the vision of the company more so than money right now.

**Andrew Peach** (0:14)
It's World Business Report from the BBC World Service.
This is Andrew Peach on the way, how SpaceX shares closed almost 20% up on the day, valuing the rocket, satellite, AI firm at more than $2 trillion. Also today, Switzerland votes on whether to limit its population, but could that damage its economy? And we'll look at the value of works by one of the world's most influential artists, David Hockney, who's died.
Let's start, though, with Elon Musk, the world's first trillionaire after his company SpaceX debuted on the Nasdaq stock market in New York. Shares closed almost 20% above their initial offer price, valuing the rocket, satellite and AI firm at more than $2 trillion. Mr. Musk said his ambition was to take people to the moon, to Mars and beyond. Shares were priced at $135 each. By the closing bell, they were changing hands at 160 Here's how the BBC's partner station CBS covered the opening bell on the Nasdaq as the biggest IPO in stock market history was launched.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:25)
If the opening bell sounds a little different today, that is because we wanted to bring you to the floor of the Nasdaq, where SpaceX executives are ringing in today's trading. They're celebrating the launch of their highly anticipated historic IPO.

**Andrew Peach** (1:39)
Well, speaking from the SpaceX HQ in Texas, Elon Musk talked about his motivations for launching the company.

**Elon Musk** (1:46)
If there's not a new company that enters space, we will never be a truly space-bearing civilization. While the other aerospace companies, they both got rockets and everything, they were simply not pursuing the technology that's necessary to make life multi-planetary, to make Star Trek, to make the exciting science fiction futures that we've read about real. And that's what SpaceX is all about.

**Andrew Peach** (2:10)
Well, to assess where we are at the close, we've been speaking to our North America business correspondent, Michelle Fleury, in New York.

**Michelle Fleury** (2:16)
It has been a fantastic first day for SpaceX. Their shares closed substantially above the initial listing price of $135. So all in all, I think Elon Musk, the founder, must be feeling pretty chuffed.
He also merges from this as the world's first trillionaire, and his company is valued at a whopping $2 trillion.

**Andrew Peach** (2:39)
There was some expectation that there might be this very early pop. I guess we now see what happens and how things shake down.

**Michelle Fleury** (2:46)
Yeah, I mean, I was talking to various analysts, and they have kind of cautioned against this, saying, look, there is always a lot of opening day excitement with the charisma, if you like, of Elon Musk. There's also a degree of FOMO, a fear of missing out, so people kind of want to jump in. The real test will come later after, if you like, a buzz around the opening day.

**Andrew Peach** (3:10)
Just break SpaceX down a bit for us, because it's got fingers in a number of big pies. Does it actually make a profit?

**Michelle Fleury** (3:17)
So, you're right. I mean, when it started, at its core, it was the idea of getting a reusable rocket up into space and back, and initially at the time that seemed like a crazy idea, a very tall order. There was a lot of skepticism, and I was speaking to an early employee, in fact, employee number one, who was a rocket engineer at the time at SpaceX, and he said, you know, there were some big highs, some big lows. There was the big high when they finally succeeded, but that came just as the company was about to go bankrupt, and it saved it. Fast forward to the next stage of the company's development, and that's when you've got satellites becoming a bigger piece of the business and the Starlink communications. That really is the moneymaker for this firm. If you look at their prospectus ahead of this flotation, it revealed that that is the bit that brings in all of, or most of the money, I should say, to the company. But it is the next bet on AI that really is the bit that gets Wall Street excited and gets investors excited, and it's this promise of orbital space, of what can be done there, of developing infrastructure to help power the AI boom and to do so in space. So data centers in space, for example, by harnessing the power of the sun.