This is how rich SpaceX workers are after the IPO
Juan Hernandez, who now works as a welder at Jeff Bezos-owned rival Blue Origin, is one of more than 4,400 current and former SpaceX employees who became millionaires on paper when the company went public.
When SpaceX hired Juan Hernandez as a welder in 2015, the company offered him $10,000 in stock alongside his $28-an-hour wage.
He accepted the equity without giving it much thought, since none of his previous hourly positions had included company shares, Hernandez told CBS News.
SpaceX priced its initial public offering at $135 per share ahead of the Nasdaq debut, valuing Hernandez's 6,500 shares at roughly $880,000 at the offer price, Fortune reported.
The offering raised $75 billion at an implied valuation of approximately $1.77 trillion, according to Nasdaq, and became the largest initial public offering in history, nearly tripling the previous global record set by Saudi Aramco's $25.6 billion listing in 2019.
However, the celebration has come with details that most headlines overlooked, and the reality of the windfall is more complex.
Shares have dropped roughly 35% from their post-debut peak, and lockup agreements prevent most employees from selling their stock for months.
SpaceX created thousands of employee millionaires from the factory floor to the C-suite
The scale of wealth creation across SpaceX's workforce makes this listing unusual among technology IPOs, which typically reward only executives and software engineers, Fortune reported.
An analysis by Hill.com, a San Francisco-based investment platform, found that about 400 employees are expected to hold stakes exceeding $100 million, the New York Times reported.
Ruchir Shah, CEO of SkillCat, an online skilled trades training startup, told Fortune that SpaceX is exposing a broader truth about the future economy, where some of the hardest-to-automate and hardest-to-fill roles sit in the physical world.
If you think about it, these are some of the most critical people for SpaceX to grow. It's just as hard to find good welders and good machinists as it is a software developer, if not harder because if there's a massive shortage, so it makes sense that they were given equity
The new millionaires include welders, machinists, technicians, and manufacturing workers who built rockets and launchpad structures for years before the listing, Fortune reported.
According to the SpaceX prospectus, the company distributed equity through stock option grants at hiring and promotion milestones, annual performance awards, and an employee stock purchase plan.
Twice-yearly liquidity events also let employees sell portions of their holdings even while the company remained private, a former employee told the Next Web.
Those periodic selling windows gave long-tenured staff an early signal of the wealth their accumulated equity could generate on open markets.
SpaceX shares have dropped roughly 35% from their post-listing peak
The stock's price trajectory since the first trading day illustrates why a brokerage account balance and a bank account balance are very different things.
SpaceX shares opened at $150 on June 12, surged to an intraday high of $225.64 on June 16, and then trended lower through late June and early July, hitting an all-time low of $145.07 on July 10, according to TradingView data.
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For Hernandez, whose 6,500 shares were worth about $1.05 million at the $160.95 first-day close according to CBS News, that decline would cut his holdings to roughly $942,500 at the $145.07 low.
Lockup restrictions add another layer of friction for employees hoping to convert paper gains into spendable cash.
SpaceX's prospectus allows most insiders to sell up to 20% of their holdings after the first quarterly earnings report, expected August 6, Fortune reported.
An additional 7% unlocks at each of the 70-, 90-, 105-, 120-, and 135-day marks, with a further 28% released after the third-quarter earnings report and the remaining restrictions lifting at day 180, the SpaceX prospectus showed.
Why SpaceX millionaires may not stay that way
On Hernandez's 6,500 shares alone, the drop from $225.64 to $145.07 wiped out roughly $524,000 in paper wealth in under a month.
Jason Schloetzer, an associate professor of accounting at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business, cautioned against reading SpaceX as a blueprint for blue-collar wealth creation.
"This is largely venture-backed compensation attached to a company that happens to build rockets," Schloetzer told Fortune.
He noted that many employees accumulated shares through the company's stock purchase plan, buying discounted equity with their paycheck deductions rather than receiving free grants.
That structure shifts financial risk from the employer to the employee, replacing the guaranteed pensions and profit-sharing arrangements that once protected industrial workers, Schloetzer explained in the Fortune interview.
SpaceX stock represents up to 90% of many employees' total net worth, Jamie Battmer, chief investment officer at Creative Planning, told CNBC, creating substantial downside exposure in a single volatile holding.
Morningstar equity analyst Nicolas Owens added a further layer of concern, placing SpaceX's fair value at $63 per share, roughly 53% below the offering price.
"Our valuation is the result of mathematics more than skepticism," Owens wrote in the firm's analysis of SpaceX's financial outlook and IPO pricing.
Newly wealthy SpaceX employees are reshaping the wealth management industry
The sudden flood of liquid wealth has pushed more than 100 SpaceX employees to band together and negotiate discounted advisory services as a group.
That collective, representing between $1 billion and $5 billion in combined assets, signed with registered investment advisor Choreo at fees starting at 0.5%, CNBC reported.
The fee falls below the industry standard range, giving the group a meaningful cost advantage over individual advisory relationships.
Jason Van de Loo, Choreo's chief executive officer, told CNBC that most investors spend decades building wealth, but SpaceX employees received theirs virtually overnight.
He compared the windfall's speed to receiving a large inheritance, noting the difficulty of processing so many financial decisions at once.
Private banks, trust companies, and independent advisors have dispatched teams to California, Texas, and Florida to court the newly wealthy employees, CNBC noted.
Related: SpaceX investors may be ignoring troubling trend
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This story was originally published July 12, 2026 at 7:37 AM.