From her bedroom in Miami, Daniella Rodriguez watched SpaceX hit the stock market Friday and blast off.
Rodriguez, 23, had a stake in the game: She was allocated one share of SpaceX ahead of its blockbuster initial public offering and she was waiting for the right moment to sell.
Seventeen minutes after trading began, Rodriguez made the call. “I love to be a part of something that’s historical in the stock market,” she told NBC News. “If you can cop $1 while you’re at it, why not?”
The SpaceX IPO made Elon Musk a trillionaire. It made Rodriguez $24 — and for her, that was a win.
“Investing and trading is a game of probabilities,” she said. “If I can take a 15% - 18% profit, then I think that’s phenomenal.”
The IPO raised $75 billion for the company, and investors quickly pushed SpaceX’s valuation past $2 trillion, a sign of how much demand has grown around the company’s AI and space ambitions.
When SpaceX stock began trading on the Nasdaq exchange shortly before noon Friday, its opening price of $150 propelled Musk, the company’s chairman, CEO and controlling shareholder, into a new tier of wealth.
But it also rewarded SpaceX’s current and former employees handsomely, and over the course of the day many watched their fortunes soar in the biggest initial public offering ever.
One of them was Robert, a former engineer at SpaceX who lives in Arizona and owns tens of thousands of company shares.
“I thought if I was lucky, they might be worth a million,” said Robert, who asked NBC News to use only his first name in order to discuss his personal finances. “The fact that it’s worth more than that, I’m kind of blown away.”
During his five years at SpaceX, Robert received equity as part of his compensation. On Friday, when trading on the Nasdaq closed at 4:00 p.m. ET, Robert’s SpaceX shares were worth more than $4 million.
Just a few years ago, Robert was living paycheck to paycheck. At one point, he said, he had just $12 to his name.
“Before I got the job at SpaceX and before I accumulated this equity, I questioned whether I would have ever been able to retire,” said Robert. “This is actually going to have a generational impact on my family.”
Robert also sold some of his equity while SpaceX was still a private company, and he used that money to buy his “forever” home.
“Having this has really changed my life,” he said.
Most of the people participating in the historic IPO were not SpaceX insiders who had spent years accumulating stock in the company. Millions of them were retail investors like Rodriguez, who received small allocations of shares through brokerage platforms.
Rodriguez had requested five shares at $135 from the online trading platform Robinhood ahead of the IPO. She received just one — demand far exceeded the number of shares available.
“There’s millions of people trying to get in on it, so it makes sense,” said Rodriguez. “I’m happy to be a part of it.”
For Rodriguez, who works in advertising full-time, participating in the IPO wasn’t just about the money — it was an experience.
“I think it is so important for people in their 20s to really start getting involved with the market, because there’s just so much opportunity and really there’s so much benefit,” she said.
Forde Todd, 20, is also starting early. A college student in Devon, Pennsylvania and a self-described “space nerd,” Todd believes in the promise of SpaceX and wanted to be part of its stock market debut.
“I am kind of sold on the idea of going to the stars,” he told NBC News in an interview Friday. “It’s hard not to be kind of tantalized by the idea of sending rockets to space.”
Todd said he requested three shares through Robinhood and received all three. He also bought several more shares on the open market, and by the close of trading Friday he was up around $250.
“I was just kind of thinking I could make a few bucks and pay for my Sweetgreen for lunch and call it a day,” said Todd. “I had a great lunch, and that was kind of my reward for the IPO.”
Todd hopes to buy more SpaceX shares in the coming weeks.
“I’m just optimistic about the future with SpaceX,” he said. “This is new. Like, quite literally, this is out of this world.”
