SpaceX’s IPO could turn 4,400 employees into millionaires
When Trevor Hise was about to graduate from college in 2011, his parents wanted him to take what they saw as a steady job at General Electric. But Mr. Hise landed an internship at a start-up he loved. Against his parents’ advice, he remained full-time with the fledgling company for the next 12 years.
The start-up was Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Today, Mr. Hise owns more than 100,000 shares of SpaceX, which he acquired during his time there. With the rocket maker expected to go public this week at $135 a share, Mr. Hise’s SpaceX stock is likely worth at least $13.5 million — a sum that left him in disbelief.
“The magnitude of it was ridiculous,” said the 37-year-old, who worked as a SpaceX launch engineer and now considers himself semi-retired.
SpaceX’s journey to the stock market has been defined by a series of superlatives. It is the largest initial public offering to date of the most dominant space company by the world’s richest man. And it is poised to unleash a generation of wealth if its stock soars to a whopping $1.77 trillion in its trading debut, five times General Electric’s market capitalization.
SpaceX’s IPO is expected to make a lot of the rich even richer. First in line is Mr Musk, 54, who is likely to become the world’s first billionaire. His friends, along with Silicon Valley venture capitalists, private equity firms and others putting money into the company, are also poised to reap billions.
But one group will gain life-changing wealth for the first time: current and former SpaceX employees. The company has 22,000 employees, with hundreds more left over the years. Some were hourly laborers who toiled at the launch sites; others sat for days in windowless offices at the SpaceX industrial complex in South Texas. For many, their work will soon pay off with the stock that was part of their compensation.
More than 4,400 current and former SpaceX employees are likely to become millionaires in the IPO, according to an analysis by Hill.com, a San Francisco-based investment platform. About 400 of them are expected to earn $100 million or more.
With most IPOs, “you’re usually just going to see the founders become billionaires,” said Andrew Benson, founder and chief executive of Hill.com, which facilitated SpaceX’s private equity trading. “It’s unusual to have 400 people at that threshold” of $100 million, he added. “That speaks to the enormous wealth that is being created here.”
A SpaceX spokesperson did not return a request for comment.
Among former SpaceX employees, one winner is Gavin Petit, 42, who joined the company in 2012 as an engineer overseeing launches. At the time, SpaceX awarded him several thousand shares on top of his $80,000 salary. Each share was worth $13.80, Mr. Petit said.
Over the years, Mr. Petit decided to take his company’s bonuses in more shares. This was considered risky because SpaceX rockets were unproven and sometimes failed. It was not clear that his work would survive, Mr. Petit said. It also meant that he had to stay with the company for five or more years until all of his shares were “vested” and vested over time.
Mr. Petit sometimes sold his SpaceX shares in “liquidation events,” where employees could sell their private shares to other buyers. These sales helped him pay off his house in Denver. But he mostly held on to his shares and has more than 50,000 shares, enough to make him a millionaire several times over.
Mr. Petit, who left SpaceX in 2023 to work at Katalyst Space Technologies, a robotic spacecraft company, said he was not sure what he would do with his wealth or whether he would sell his shares. Like most companies that go public, SpaceX limits when employees can sell after the IPO, according to its financial filings.
The offering is “the Coca-Cola or Google IPO of my time,” he said, a life-changing event of wealth like winning the lottery. “I was so lucky to be involved.
Not all SpaceX employees kept their stock. Some thought the company would never go public, especially when Mr. Musk talked about his disdain for public companies and how they had to release information to shareholders every few months. Rumors circulated among some workers that early SpaceX employees traded their stock for gift cards to restaurants like Chili’s. Those employees are now consumed with regret, according to several SpaceX employees.
Helvin Bacareza, 40, who started working at SpaceX’s South Texas location in 2020 as a global supply manager, said he wondered if he should have lasted longer at the company. He left after two years.
But Mr. Bacareza still amassed a “significant” amount of stock, he said, declining to give details. He laughed when asked if he had sold any shares over the years. “I’m not an idiot!” he said, adding that he plans to hold the stock after the company goes public.
Mr. Hise, whose parents wanted SpaceX to decline, said he understood their concerns in 2011. Growing up in Cocoa, Florida, his mother sold furniture and his father worked as a plumber at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral.
“There was a very strong perception at the time that SpaceX was an unproven start-up that wasn’t going to last very long,” Mr. Hise recalled.
But his gamble with the company made more and more sense as its stock rose in value along with SpaceX’s valuation. Mr. Hise has sold SpaceX stock on occasion, for example to pay for his wedding and a down payment on a home, though he has kept most of it.
After leaving SpaceX in 2023, Mr. Hise invested in several real estate ventures. With an IPO on the horizon, he and his wife, an artist, have hired a financial planner and are starting a foundation to give away some of their newfound wealth, he said.
What about his parents who thought SpaceX wasn’t the right career choice? “They are very proud,” Mr. Hise said.
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.