In the early hours of June 12, 2026, Beijing time (June 12, Eastern Time), the most astonishing moment in human business history unfolded: SpaceX officially landed on Nasdaq under the ticker "SPCX," with an IPO price of $135, raising $75 billion, and closing 19.22% higher on its first day, soaring to a market cap of $2.1 trillion—equivalent to 7 CATLs, 9 Toyotas, or 10 Berkshire Hathaways. The mastermind behind history's largest IPO, Elon Musk, saw his personal net worth surpass the $1 trillion mark, becoming the first "trillion-dollar man" in human history. From a teen in Pretoria, South Africa, to a lone gambler straddling six trillion-dollar sectors—payments, electric vehicles, rockets, satellites, AI, and brain-machine interfaces—Musk spent half a century translating "madness" into the most expensive business language of this era. Looking back at his dream-building journey, controversies abound as much as legends, but no one can deny: he redefined the boundaries of human commerce with a series of seemingly impossible bets.

I. South African Childhood: The Bullied "Nerd" and His First Cognitive Bucket

Elon Musk was born on June 28, 1971, into a middle-class family in Pretoria, South Africa. His father was an engineer, and his mother was a nutritionist and model. At nine, his parents divorced, and he lived with his father, showing an astonishing fascination with machinery and coding. At ten, Musk got his first computer, and by twelve, he sold his self-written space-themed video game, Blastar, for $500—his first "business income."

Teenage Musk was far from happy. Bullied frequently for being introverted, bookish, and obsessive, he was once pushed down a staircase by classmates and hospitalized. At seventeen, he left South Africa alone, moving between Canada and the U.S., surviving on odd jobs, collecting firewood, and staying in shelters. After earning dual degrees in economics and physics from Wharton, he enrolled in a Stanford Ph.D. program in applied physics—only to drop out after two days to start a business. In 1995, with $20,000 from his father, he founded Zip2, a city navigation software company, which was acquired by Compaq for $307 million four years later. At twenty-eight, Musk pocketed $22 million in cash, tasting "wealth through technology" for the first time.

II. PayPal Coup: The Ousted Founder and His Costliest "Lesson"

After Zip2, Musk founded X.com in 1999, focusing on online banking. In 2000, X.com merged with Confinity, founded by Peter Thiel, giving birth to PayPal, which would later revolutionize global payments. Theoretically, as CEO of the merged company, Musk should have been the big winner.

But business is crueler than technology. During a 2000 holiday coup, Musk was "ousted" from PayPal by the board for being "too idealistic and poor at management." He lost the company he nurtured, retaining only about 11.7% of the shares—which turned into $180 million in cash when eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion in 2002.

Those were Musk's darkest years. His wife, Justine, lost a child, and their marriage faltered; SpaceX's rockets exploded three times, nearly bankrupting the company; Tesla, which he had just taken over, was a mess. Years later, he admitted in an interview: "I bet everything on 2008." That year, he was forced to serve as CEO of both Tesla and SpaceX—two positions deemed doomed to fail.

III. 2008 Dual-Line Life-and-Death: Rockets to Space and Cars to Mass Production—A Gambler's All-In Bet

2008 was Musk's most critical "rollercoaster year." Early that year, SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket exploded three times in test launches, with cash reserves enough for only one more attempt. The night before the fourth launch, Musk had sold his private jet, mortgaged all his properties, and poured his last $100 million into the endeavor. On September 28, 2008, Falcon 1 successfully reached orbit—the first liquid-fueled rocket developed by a private company to do so. NASA soon awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract, keeping the company alive.

Almost simultaneously, Tesla was enduring its own "production hell." Its first product, the Roadster, suffered from cost overruns, poor battery yields, and mass employee resignations, with cash reserves enough to last only days. Musk shuffled funds between SpaceX and Tesla, writing in a 2008 Christmas Eve internal letter: "We must tighten our belts, avoid bankruptcy, avoid layoffs, and charge forward like Don Quixote." Tesla secured a new funding round in February 2008 and went public on Nasdaq in June 2010, becoming the first U.S. automaker to do so since Ford in 1956.

IV. Tesla's Deification: Transforming Electric Cars from "Rich Toys" to "Global Infrastructure"

If SpaceX transformed aerospace, Tesla rewrote automotive history. When Musk led Tesla's $6.5 million Series A in 2004 and became CEO in 2008, Tesla was a tiny workshop struggling to deliver a few cars. His first move was to bet on a three-tier product strategy: "premium → mid-range → affordable"—using the Roadster to build the brand, the Model S/X to set benchmarks, and the Model 3/Y to scale.

The 2016 Model 3 launch faced "production hell," with weekly output stuck below 2,000 units for months. Musk slept in a tent at Tesla's Fremont factory to oversee production, even smoking marijuana on camera to relieve stress. But by Q2 2018, Model 3 weekly output hit 5,000, Tesla's cash flow turned positive, and its stock soared 14-fold over the next two years.

Behind this was Musk's extreme faith in "hardware-software integration" and "vertical integration": developing the 4680 battery, the FSD autonomous driving chip, the AI training chip Dojo, building the Supercharger network, and launching the Megapack energy storage business. He transformed an electric car into a "mobile computing terminal + energy storage unit." By 2020, Tesla's market cap exceeded $300 billion, peaking at $1.2 trillion in 2021—making it the world's most valuable automaker.

V. Starlink and Neuralink: From Earth to Mars, Creating a "Silicon-Based Humanity"

Musk's ambitions never stopped at cars and rockets. In 2015, he launched "Starlink" to deploy 42,000 low-Earth-orbit satellites, redefining global internet access. In 2016, he co-founded Neuralink to implant electrodes in human brains, enabling "human-machine symbiosis." In 2023, he founded xAI to build "superintelligence that understands the universe." In 2024, he acquired Twitter and renamed it X, aiming to create a "universal app." In early 2026, he orchestrated SpaceX's acquisition of xAI, merging rockets, satellites, and AI into a single capital narrative.

These moves all point to one goal: building a civilization beyond Earth. SpaceX's Starship, the largest and most powerful rocket in history, aims to land humans on Mars by 2029 and establish a million-person city by 2050. Though its maiden flight exploded in April 2023, subsequent launches in 2024 and 2025 succeeded, including a historic "chopstick" rocket recovery.

The June 12 SpaceX IPO was the capital coronation of this "Mars narrative." SPCX's $2.1 trillion market cap on its first day surpassed Tesla, Meta, and Nvidia, ranking seventh globally. Musk's $1 trillion net worth instantly redefined the standard for the world's richest person, pushing the benchmark from "tens of billions" to "trillions."

This is . Next time, we'll continue dissecting the humanity, vision, and destiny behind business.

Source: Investor Network