7500 亿美元的史诗级 IPO：SpaceX 上市，与一个万亿富翁的诞生

Today we'll talk about something destined to be written into history.

Yesterday, June 12, SpaceX officially went public.

This is the largest IPO in human history.

Let's first briefly introduce SpaceX.

It's an American aerospace company.

The boss is Musk.

It's most famous for two things.

First, reusable rockets.

Old rockets, once launched, were scrapped.

Extremely expensive.

But SpaceX managed to let a rocket, after launching into the sky,

steadily fly back down, land, and be used again.

This greatly lowered the cost of going to space.

Second, Starlink.

In low Earth orbit, SpaceX

has deployed tens of thousands of small satellites.

These satellites form a net,

able to provide high-speed internet to any corner of the globe.

Even in the middle of the ocean, on a battlefield, in a desert,

you can connect to the network.

So Starlink has now become

SpaceX's most profitable business.

Okay, that's the background.

Let's talk about 'going public' itself.

For friends not so familiar with finance,

let's first explain what an IPO is.

IPO, in Chinese, is called 'first public offering of shares'.

Put plainly, it's when an originally private company,

for the first time, takes its shares to a stock exchange,

and sells them openly to the public.

Before this, SpaceX was a private company.

Its shares were held by only a small number of people.

Ordinary people couldn't buy in even with money.

But after going public yesterday, things changed.

Any ordinary investor

can now buy SpaceX stock on the market.

The ticker is SPCX, traded on Nasdaq.

Let's look at some numbers.

This IPO's offering price was set at 135 dollars per share.

But market demand was truly red-hot.

The opening price shot straight to 150 dollars.

Intraday, it touched as high as 176 dollars.

It finally closed, settling at around 161 dollars.

This means that on the first day of trading,

the share price rose about 19%.

And the whole IPO raised funds

of about 75 billion dollars.

What kind of scale is this?

It broke the record in one stroke,

becoming the largest IPO in the world ever.

After going public, SpaceX's valuation

reached about 1.77 trillion dollars.

Intraday it briefly broke 2 trillion.

It instantly became America's sixth-largest public company.

And the biggest winner of this feast, with no suspense,

is Musk himself.

As SpaceX's share price soared,

the value of the shares he holds exploded upward.

He officially became the world's

first 'trillionaire'.

In other words, his personal wealth

broke through the one-trillion-dollar mark for the first time.

In human history, this is the first time

a single person has accumulated such enormous wealth.

However, this IPO

also has one detail especially worth mentioning.

Usually when a company goes public,

the portion left for retail — that is, ordinary individual investors —

is often small, about only 5% to 10%.

The bulk is taken by large institutions.

But according to reports, this time Musk specifically requested

leaving as much as 30% of the shares

for ordinary retail investors.

More than three times the industry norm.

Behind this is, in fact, Musk's consistent thinking:

he wants the ordinary people who believe in and support him

to also be able to get on this train and share in the company's growth dividend.

Of course, you could also say

this is a very clever way

of turning fans into shareholders.

So, let's step back and think about a question.

Why do so many people in the world

frantically want to buy into an aerospace company?

Bear in mind, aerospace is a business

of huge investment, slow returns, and high risk.

When it comes down to it, what people are buying

is not today's rockets and satellites.

It's a narrative about the future.

A narrative that humanity will eventually move into space on a large scale.

With real money,

they've cast a vote of confidence in this narrative.

Will this future actually come true?

No one can give an answer.

Maybe decades later, looking back,

yesterday was the dawn of a great era.

Maybe, it's just another

overhyped bubble.

History will deliver its verdict.

At the end of the show, I want to leave the question with you.

Humanity spends so much money and so much effort,

desperately trying to leave Earth and head for space.

What do you think the meaning of this is?

Are we, in the end, fleeing from something,

or running toward something?

This question has no standard answer.

But it's worth us, when we gaze up at the stars,

thinking it through seriously.