By Joe Brock and David Jeans
NEW YORK, June 12 (Reuters) – On Friday, Elon Musk’s image loomed large over Times Square from the giant TV screen of the Nasdaq stock exchange, as tourists outside snapped selfies, SpaceX investors in T‑shirts grinned at their newfound fortunes and news cameras jostled for position.
“If people had told me this was going to happen, I was like, ‘man you must be smoking some really good crack,’” Musk said in a video address celebrating SpaceX going public. “I gave SpaceX less than a 10% chance of succeeding at all.”
Global reaction to SpaceX’s public listing – which values the company at more than $2 trillion and has made Musk the world’s first trillionaire – has spanned investor euphoria to admiration among fans and sharp criticism from politicians and members of the public who see him as a symbol of rising global inequality.
At Starbase, where SpaceX launches its Starship rockets on the Texas border with Mexico, cheering fans traveled from far and wide in the hope of catching a glimpse of Musk. Lesley Varin, from Washington state, surrounded her car with stuffed toys holding handwritten signs celebrating SpaceX. One read: “Congrats Elon, Big 1st!”
Minutes after SpaceX started trading on the Nasdaq, Goldman Sachs posted an image on X of employees wearing custom SpaceX Nike shoes. Musk himself posted an image of Morgan Stanley bankers celebrating the IPO.
But alongside excitement came equal concerns about Musk’s growing power. A day before the IPO, an Elon Musk effigy the size of a house was positioned in front of the Nasdaq building, depicting him shirtless and highlighting problems with sexualized images of minors on Grok, Musk’s AI chatbot.
On Friday, protesters marched outside JPMorgan’s headquarters in a ‘Stop Musk’ rally which organizers said was intended to disrupt a party CEO Jamie Dimon is hosting for the company. One sign, according to a post on Threads, read: “Send billionaires to Mars.”
PROTEST AGAINST MUSK THE TRILLIONAIRE
Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has long campaigned against wealth inequality, said Musk becoming a trillionaire was a feature of a “rigged economy.”
“We are living in a time when more and more people are just hanging on by their fingernails to survive in this economy,” Warren said on X. “Today’s marker should be a wake up call.”
In Poland, where Musk’s personal wealth now exceeds the entire GDP of the country, citizens expressed bewilderment at the sheer scale of his fortune. “Behind that money goes the imposed will of a person who, frankly speaking, is quite psychologically unusual,” said Janusz Wojczakowski, an 82-year-old Polish teacher and philosopher.
But Musk, wearing a black leather jacket, used his message on Friday to sell SpaceX as a way for everyday people to experience space travel. “We want to take you there, not just a few astronauts. We mean you, literally you,” he said.
In Times Square, one early investor who bought into SpaceX through a family office in 2020 posed for selfies with four friends in matching SpaceX T‑shirts. He said he expected the stock to jump on debut as limited supply meets strong demand from retail investors and index funds, which track major markets.
Asked whether he would be among the thousands of millionaires created by the IPO, he added: “We’ll see … I’m not counting my chickens.”
(Reporting by Joe Brock and David Jeans; Additional reporting by Akash Sriram and Echo Wang; Editing by Daniel Wallis)
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