SAN FRANCISCO — When Trevor Hise was about to graduate from college in 2011, his parents wanted him to take what they saw as a stable job at General Electric. But Hise had landed an internship at a startup he was passionate about. Against his parents’ advice, he stayed with the company and worked full time for the next 12 years.
A startup era a SpaceX, de Elon Musk.
Also read:
Today, Hise owns more than 100,000 SpaceX shares, accumulated during the period he worked at the company. With the rocket maker about to go public at $135 per share, Hise’s SpaceX holdings are likely worth at least $13.5 million — an amount he still has trouble believing he owns.
“The scale of it all is absurd,” said the 37-year-old former SpaceX launch engineer, who now considers himself semi-retired.
SpaceX’s path to the stock market was marked by a series of extraordinary achievements. It is the largest initial public offering in the history of a space company that dominates the sector, led by the richest man in the world.
Continues after advertising
And it stands to generate multigenerational fortunes if the stock soars in its debut, supported by a staggering market valuation of $1.77 trillion, five times the market value of General Electric.
SpaceX’s IPO is expected to make a lot of rich people even richer. At the top of the queue is 54-year-old Musk, who could become the world’s first trillionaire. His friends, as well as Silicon Valley venture capitalists, private equity firms and others who have put money into the company, also stand to pocket billions.
But there is one group that will achieve transformative wealth for the first time: current and former SpaceX employees. The company has 22 thousand employees, in addition to hundreds of former employees who have left over the years.
Continues after advertising
Some were hourly workers who worked at launch sites; others spent days at a time in offices that, in the past, didn’t even have windows, inside the SpaceX industrial complex in South Texas. For many of them, the job is about to yield huge gains through the shares they receive as part of their compensation.
More than 4,400 current and former SpaceX employees are likely to become millionaires with the IPO, according to analysis by San Francisco-based investment platform Hill.com. Of these, around 400 are expected to accumulate assets of US$100 million or more.
“In most IPOs, typically only the founders become billionaires,” said Andrew Benson, founder and CEO of Hill.com, which facilitated SpaceX private equity trades. “It’s not common to see 400 people at that level” of US$100 million, he added. “It shows the enormous wealth that is being created here.”
Continues after advertising
A SpaceX spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Among former SpaceX employees, one of the beneficiaries is Gavin Petit, 42, who joined the company in 2012 as an engineer responsible for supervising launches. At the time, SpaceX gave him a few thousand shares in addition to his $80,000 salary. Each share was worth US$13.80, according to Petit.
Over the years, Petit chose to receive his bonuses in more shares. This was considered risky because SpaceX’s rockets had not yet proven themselves and sometimes failed.
Continues after advertising
It was also not certain that his job would survive, he said. Furthermore, the decision meant remaining with the company for five years or more until all shares were gradually acquired and incorporated into its assets.
Petit sold some of his SpaceX shares at some of the biannual liquidity events, where employees could trade their private holdings with other buyers.
Those sales helped him pay off his Denver home. Still, he kept most of the shares and today he owns more than 50 thousand shares, enough to make him a millionaire several times over.
Petit, who left SpaceX in 2023 to work at Katalyst Space Technologies, a robotic spacecraft company, said he does not know exactly what he will do with his fortune or whether he will sell his shares.
As with most companies that go public, SpaceX restricts when employees can sell their shares after the IPO, according to its financial documents.
The public offering is “my generation’s Coca-Cola or Google IPO,” he said, likening it to a transformative get-rich event akin to winning the lottery. “I was very lucky to have gotten into this.”
Not all SpaceX employees maintained their shares. Some believed that the company would never go public, especially because Musk used to show an aversion to publicly listed companies and the requirements for periodic disclosure of information to shareholders.
Rumors circulated among some workers that early SpaceX employees had traded their shares for gift cards to restaurants such as Chili’s. According to several company employees, these people are now consumed by regret.
Helvin Bacareza, 40, who started working at SpaceX’s South Texas facility in 2020 as a global supply manager, said he sometimes wonders if he should have stayed at the company longer. He left after two years.
Still, Bacareza accumulated a “substantial” amount of shares, he said, without providing details. Asked about having sold any shares over the years, he laughed.
“I’m not an idiot!”, he said, adding that he intends to keep the shares after the company goes public.
Hise, whose parents wanted him to turn down the SpaceX job, 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 in Cape Canaveral.
“At the time, there was a very strong feeling that SpaceX was a startup with no proven track record and that it wouldn’t last long,” recalled Hise.
But his bet on the company started to make more and more sense as its shares rose in value along with SpaceX’s valuation. Hise occasionally sold some of the papers, for example, to pay for her wedding and a down payment on a house, although she kept most of them.
After leaving SpaceX in 2023, Hise invested in several real estate ventures. With the IPO approaching, he and his wife, an artist, have hired a financial planner and are creating a foundation to donate some of their newfound wealth, he said.
What about the parents, who believed that SpaceX was not the right career choice?
“They have a lot of pride,” Hise said.
c.2026 The New York Times Company
