according to The Wall Street Journal<\/a>.<\/p>\n\u201cIt\u2019s put me in a comfortable position for life,\u201d Juan Hernandez, a welder who left SpaceX last year and is set to see the value of his shares hit $880,000 with the IPO, told the Journal.<\/p>\n
Hernandez was initially hired at $28 per hour as a contractor before being brought on full-time, and has sold some of his stake to build a small real-estate business, the newspaper reported.<\/p>\n
The company\u2019s IPO is expected to price shares at $135 each, with a total valuation of about $1.77 trillion, according to the Journal, which noted workers and insiders generally won\u2019t be allowed to sell pre-IPO shares for a couple of months.<\/p>\n
SpaceX was valued at $800 billion last year, but its value grew to $1.25 trillion after the space exploration company merged in February with Musk\u2019s artificial intelligence company, xAI. Now, SpaceX plans an IPO that could become one of the biggest stock sales ever \u2014 even though the company is currently losing billions of dollars a year. SpaceX lost $2.6 billion from operations last year on $18.7 billion in revenue, according to a May regulatory filing, and the losses kept piling up at the start of this year. xAI, which features the Grok chatbot, lost $6.4 billion in operations last year, according to a company document.<\/p>\n
Musk got SpaceX to buy xAI earlier this year despite protests from some SpaceX investors that it was a bailout and unethical, given that he was a controlling shareholder in both.<\/p>\n
SpaceX said last week that it plans to raise up to $75 billion when it goes public this month, setting the stage for the largest-ever stock market debut and putting Musk on course to become the world\u2019s first trillionaire. An offering of that size would easily break the record for the largest IPO, which was set by Saudi Aramco in 2019 when the oil giant went public and raised $26 billion.<\/p>\n
For former SpaceX engineer J. Andr\u00e9 Lavoie, the future includes continuing to renovate a hotel in Pontebba in northern Italy, where he moved five years ago, the Journal reported. His stake in the company is valued at over $28 million at the planned IPO price, according to the newspaper, and he is considering helping his town transition to cleaner heating options.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t want to just die with a pile of money in the bank,\u201d he told the Journal.<\/p>\n
The Associated Press contributed to this story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Thousands of SpaceX employees are poised to become millionaires when Elon Musk\u2019s space exploration and AI venture holds…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":262898,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[75,84,83,9,24,63],"class_list":["post-262897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-manhattan","tag-manhattan","tag-manhattan-headlines","tag-manhattan-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=262897"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262897\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/262898"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=262897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=262897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=262897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}