A man who earned $28 an hour at SpaceX is about to become a millionaire today because of the IPO. But he is just 1 of 4,400 SpaceX employees becoming millionaires today. SpaceX begins trading on Nasdaq today under the ticker SPCX, priced at $135 per share and valued at $1.77 trillion. The offering raised $75 billion and drew more than $250 billion in investor demand, more than three times oversubscribed. More than 4,400 current and former SpaceX employees are projected to become millionaires today. Around 400 of them will hold stakes worth over $100 million each. To put that in context, the Google IPO in 2004 created roughly 1,000 millionaires. Facebook's 2012 listing produced a similar number. SpaceX is doing more than four times both of them in a single day. And the majority of these people are not founders or executives. They are engineers, welders, machinists, and launch technicians who took equity over cash and held it for years. Juan Hernandez moved from Mexico and learned to weld for the money. He joined SpaceX in 2015 earning $28 an hour. When he went full time, the company gave him $10,000 worth of stock. He held it, bought more through payroll deductions, and sold a small portion in 2020 to buy property in Texas. His remaining shares are worth $880,000 today. Trevor Hise joined as a launch engineer straight out of college in 2011. He spent 12 years accumulating shares through salary, bonuses, and reinvestment. He is 37 years old and walking away with more than $13.5 million. Gavin Petit started in 2012 on an $80,000 base salary with a small initial grant priced at $13.80 per share. He took every bonus in stock. He has already paid off his home in Denver from earlier tender offer windows and now holds a stake worth several million dollars. J. André Lavoie, an engineer who received grants years ago, is sitting on more than $28 million. He is currently in Italy renovating a hotel. Tom Mueller was SpaceX's first employee, hired in 2002 to build the engines that made all of this possible. He left in 2020 but kept his equity. This week he said: "Elon always said that your salary is one thing, but it's the equity that's gonna be worth something. That day is here." This is what SpaceX's compensation model actually looked like from the beginning. The company paid below market salaries and made up the difference in equity at every level of the organisation, not just at the top. Stock options vested over four to six years. Workers could buy additional shares at a 15% discount through a company purchase plan. Early option grants were priced below $2 per share. Even 2025 grants carried exercise prices between $37 and $42. At $135 today, those positions are sitting at 3x returns minimum. The physical impact is already visible in Brownsville, Texas, one of the poorest cities in the United States, where more than 3,000 SpaceX employees work at Starbase. Median home prices in the surrounding county have gone from $131,000 in 2014 to over $281,000 today. More than 100 SpaceX employees pooled their combined holdings, estimated between $1 billion and $5 billion to negotiate institutional level wealth management fees as individual workers. Today, SPCX opens and 4,400 people find out what years of holding actually pays.