Countless investors worldwide are eagerly awaiting their chance to bet on SpaceX’s future success through the company’s targeted $75 billion IPO, slated to be the largest, and perhaps most talked-about in history.
But before the 555,555,555 shares (1) in Elon Musk’s space exploration baby hits the public market on June 12 (2), thousands of people will already be laughing with the knowledge that the value of their existing stake is about to be pushed into the stratosphere.
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This includes everyone from Rapper 2 Chainz and former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos (3) to an unknown number of current and former SpaceX employees (4) — including 27-year-old mariner Maryellyn Musselman, who was tasked with cleaning up floating rocket junk from the company’s many launches.
Insiders who leaned in are now set to cash in
During her tenure at the firm, Musselman took advantage of the option to convert a portion of her paycheck (in her case, 10%) into SpaceX equity, which she held onto rather than re-selling via secondary insider sales (4).
She remains tight-lipped about what her stake, which also includes shares she received as part of her compensation, amounted to after two years with the company — or, what it might be worth come Friday.
She did confirm with The Wall Street Journal (4), however, that she hasn’t yet decided how quickly after the IPO she will release her holdings, the money from which she intends to use to open her own business, like others interviewed by the outlet earlier in June.
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Predictions for the IPO and future stock valuations
Some experts purport that a $5,000 investment on Friday could realistically be worth (5) up to $8,745 in five years’ time. Others expect that, given the company’s speculative and arguably overvalued (6) nature, some early public investors could be in for “an expensive lesson” (7) down the line.
As one Reddit user (8) aptly wrote in a recent discussion about the IPO, “No one knows; SpaceX could rocket just from hype alone or its financial reality might hit it on day one.”
The IPO filing itself contained some revelatory financials, including for SpaceX’s AI arm, xAI, which reported operating losses of $6.4 billion last year. It only brought in $3.2 billion (9) in revenue — pretty standard for AI (10), though still cause for concern for those who worry about the sector’s potential future profitability and questionable returns (11) on billions in capital expenditures.
