{"id":358246,"date":"2026-06-12T19:24:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T19:24:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/358246\/"},"modified":"2026-06-12T19:24:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T19:24:09","slug":"heres-how-spacexs-ipo-could-juice-california-coffers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/358246\/","title":{"rendered":"Here\u2019s how SpaceX\u2019s IPO could juice California coffers"},"content":{"rendered":"

SpaceX<\/a> shares surged as much as 30% on Friday, reaching over $2.25 trillion in market capitalization and making Elon Musk the world\u2019s first trillionaire.<\/p>\n

Though it\u2019s now headquartered in Texas, SpaceX still has many ties to California and the Bay Area. The world\u2019s largest initial public offering is expected to boost California wallets and state tax coffers, enriching over 7,600 Hawthorne<\/a> (Los Angeles County) SpaceX workers\u00a0\u2014 though not as much as Musk\u2019s financial bonanza.<\/p>\n

SpaceX subsidiary xAI is headquartered in Palo Alto and has a San Francisco office<\/a> in the Mission, coincidentally the ex-headquarters of OpenAI, which is also moving to go public<\/a>. (Musk co-founded<\/a> OpenAI and paid its rent.) SpaceX\u2019s X division (formerly Twitter) has offices in Palo Alto and San Jose. SpaceX has 21,000 global employees, but it isn\u2019t clear how many employees the xAI and X subsidiaries have.<\/p>\n

SpaceX is already one of the biggest public corporate titans, becoming the sixth-most valuable U.S. public company\u00a0\u2014\u00a0 nearly double the size of Musk\u2019s Tesla\u00a0\u2014 and making up roughly 3% of the entire U.S. stock market.<\/p>\n

Musk owns more than 40% of SpaceX\u2019s common stock, far more than anyone else, but some Bay Area heavyweights have significant holdings. Google\u2019s parent Alphabet owns between 6% to 7.5% of the company, a stake worth around $135 billion to 170 billion on Friday. (Alphabet itself is valued at $4.4 trillion.) San Francisco-based Founders Fund owns around 3% of the company, and Menlo Park-based venture capital giant Sequoia Capital owns around 1.5%, both holdings worth tens of billions of dollars on Friday. Stanford University also has ownership in SpaceX through its investment into Founders Found.<\/p>\n

The company\u2019s tax payments are less clear. SpaceX pays California corporate taxes and residents of the state must pay capital gains taxes after they sell stock, ranging from 1% to 13.3%. There\u2019s no current estimate of how much capital gains taxes that California expects to gain, said H.D. Palmer, spokesperson for the California Department of Finance. How many employees decide to sell stock and the timing of sales is impossible to predict, he noted.<\/p>\n

\u201cRelative to past IPOs, tax revenues from the SpaceX IPO are likely to be less immediate and more unpredictable. This is because, unlike past IPOs when employees\u2019 restricted stock units became taxable on IPO day, employees at SpaceX have already paid income taxes on their vested restricted stock units,\u201d said Chas Alamo, principal fiscal and policy analyst at the state\u2019s non-partisan Legislative Analyst\u2019s Office. Future tax revenue will depend on the number of pre-IPO investors who sell during the lock-up period and in the future.<\/p>\n

SpaceX\u2019s lock-up period<\/a> allows pre-IPO shareholders to sell up to 20% of eligible shares on the second full day of trading after SpaceX\u2019s first quarterly earnings report. An additional 7% of restricted shares unlock after 70, 90, 105, 120 and 135 days after Friday\u2019s IPO. Amid the AI boom, the analyst\u2019s office previously upgraded the state\u2019s tax revenue outlook<\/a> by $25 billion last month, but also warned of a potential bubble.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis upgraded outlook is almost entirely attributable to higher expectations for income tax collections, which are being driven by enthusiasm around AI and the related stock market boom,\u201d the agency said.But staff warned that \u201cwe continue to caution that these surging revenues likely are not sustainable. This suggests it would be prudent to approach the state budget as if we are at or near a revenue peak.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last year, SpaceX lost nearly $5 billion as it invested heavily in artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n

More blockbuster initial public offerings are coming. Anthropic and OpenAI both filed confidentially for IPOs in the last two weeks, and the two AI leaders have valuations nearing $1 trillion each. Both companies are headquartered in San Francisco and thousands of employees are expected to become millionaires or multi-millionaires as a result.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SpaceX shares surged as much as 30% on Friday, reaching over $2.25 trillion in market capitalization and making…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":358247,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8,383,995,2013],"class_list":["post-358246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-economy","tag-tech","tag-us-and-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=358246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358246\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/358247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=358246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=358246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=358246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}