As Trevor Hise was getting ready to graduate from college in 2011, his parents wanted him to take what they saw as a stable job at General Electric. But Mr. Hise had landed an internship at a start-up he loved. Against his parents’ advice, he stayed for a full-time job at that young company for the next 12 years.
The start-up was Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Today, Mr. Hise has more than 100,000 SpaceX shares that he earned from his time working there. With the rocket maker expected to go public this week at $135 a share, Mr. Hise’s SpaceX stock is likely worth at least $13.5 million — a sum that has left him in disbelief.
“The magnitude of this has been ridiculous,” said the 37-year-old, who worked as a SpaceX launch engineer and now considers himself semiretired.
SpaceX’s journey to the stock market has been defined by a series of superlatives. It is the biggest-ever initial public offering of the most dominant space company by the world’s richest man. And it is set to unleash generational wealth if its shares soar in its trading debut at the whopping valuation of $1.77 trillion, five times the market capitalization of General Electric.
SpaceX’s I.P.O. is expected to make a lot of rich people even richer. First in the queue is Mr. Musk, 54, who is likely to become the world’s first trillionaire. His friends, along with Silicon Valley venture capitalists, private investment firms and others who put money into the company, are also set to reap billions.
But one group will gain life-changing wealth for the first time: SpaceX’s current and former employees. The company has 22,000 employees, and hundreds more left over the years. Some were hourly blue-collar workers who toiled at launch sites; others sat for days straight in once-windowless offices at SpaceX’s industrial complex in South Texas. For many, their work is about to pay off big through the stock that was part of their compensation.
More than 4,400 current and former SpaceX employees are likely to become millionaires in the I.P.O., according to an analysis by Hill.com, a San Francisco-based investment platform. Of those, about 400 are expected to earn $100 million or more.
With most I.P.O.s, “you’re usually only going to see the founders become billionaires,” said Andrew Benson, the founder and chief executive of Hill.com, which has facilitated the trading of private SpaceX shares. “It’s uncommon to have 400 people at that threshold” of $100 million, he added. “It speaks to the enormous wealth that’s being created here.”
A SpaceX spokesman did not return a request for comment.
Among SpaceX’s former employees, one winner is Gavin Petit, 42, who joined the company in 2012 as an engineer who oversaw launches. At the time, SpaceX awarded him several thousand shares on top of his $80,000 salary. Each share was worth $13.80, Mr. Petit said.
Over the years, Mr. Petit chose to take his company bonuses in more shares. That was considered risky because SpaceX’s rockets were unproven and sometimes failed. It was not clear his job would survive, Mr. Petit said. It also meant he had to stay at the company for five or more years until all his shares “vested” and were earned over time.
Mr. Petit sometimes sold his SpaceX shares in biannual “liquidity events,” where employees could sell their private shares to other buyers. Those sales helped him pay off his house in Denver. But he mostly held on to his stock and has more than 50,000 shares, enough to make him a millionaire several times over.
Mr. Petit, who left SpaceX in 2023 to work at Katalyst Space Technologies, a robotic spacecraft company, said he was not sure what he would do with his wealth or whether he would sell his shares. Like most companies that go public, SpaceX restricts when employees can sell after an I.P.O., according to its financial filings.
The offering is “the Coca-Cola or Google I.P.O. of my time,” he said, a life-changing wealth event like winning the lottery. “I got so lucky I got hooked into it.”
Not all SpaceX employees kept their shares. Some thought the company would never go public, especially since Mr. Musk talked about his disdain for public companies and how they had to keep disclosing information every few months to shareholders. Rumors circulated among some workers that early SpaceX employees had traded in their stock for restaurant gift cards, like Chili’s. Those employees are now consumed by regret, according to multiple SpaceX workers.
Helvin Bacareza, 40, who started working at SpaceX’s South Texas location in 2020 as a global supply manager, said he wondered if he should have stuck it out at the company for longer. He left after two years.
But Mr. Bacareza nonetheless accumulated a “substantial” amount of stock, he said, declining to give details. Asked whether he had sold any shares over the years, he laughed. “I’m not an idiot!” he said, adding that he plans to hold on to the shares after the company goes public.
Mr. Hise, whose parents wanted him to turn down SpaceX, said he understood their concerns in 2011. When he was growing up in Cocoa, Fla., his mother sold furniture and his father worked as a plumber at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral.
“At the time, there was very much the sentiment that SpaceX was an unproven start-up that wouldn’t last very long,” Mr. Hise recalled.
But his gamble on the company increasingly made sense, as his shares grew in value alongside SpaceX’s valuation. Mr. Hise occasionally sold SpaceX’s stock, such as to pay for his wedding and for a home down payment, though he kept most of it.
After leaving SpaceX in 2023, Mr. Hise invested in several real estate ventures. With the I.P.O. on the horizon, he and his wife, an artist, have hired a financial planner and are setting up a foundation to give away some of their newfound wealth, he said.
What about his parents, who thought SpaceX wasn’t the right career choice? “They’re very proud,” Mr. Hise said.
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.