The Stock Market Boom Is a Boon for Billionaires
The SpaceX IPO made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire — and exposed the hollowness of the claim that the stock market has been democratized. Nearly 90% of stocks are owned by the wealthiest 10%, and that skew is only getting more extreme.

SpaceX’s otherworldly valuation, which even some who eagerly purchased shares on its opening day admitted was “outrageous” and “stupid,” reflects the irrational exuberance that has overtaken the stock market since the introduction of AI. (Adam Gray / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The initial public offering (IPO) of SpaceX earlier this month was historic in several ways. Not only did it instantly make Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire, but it also shattered the record for the largest IPO in history. Overnight SpaceX became one of the biggest mega-cap companies on the stock exchange, with an initial valuation of $1.77 trillion that soared to over $2 trillion on the first day of trading. On the second day, the company jumped another 20 percent and surpassed Amazon as the fifth most valuable company on the exchange — bringing Musk’s net worth up to a ludicrous $1.4 trillion.
Looking solely at the fundamentals, SpaceX has now easily surpassed Musk’s other public company, Tesla, as the most overvalued major company in the world. The numbers almost defy belief. Because SpaceX lost almost $5 billion last year, it has been widely evaluated by its price-to-sales (P/S) ratio, which compares a company’s stock price to its revenues. This indicator first became common in the 1990s, when many of the new internet companies were operating at significant losses and therefore couldn’t be measured by the traditional price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio. Based on its opening IPO price of $135, the rocket company started trading with a P/S ratio of around 95; by its third day of trading, that number had soared to over 140.
To grasp just how ridiculous this is, it helps to look at the S&P 500’s historical average, which is 1.8 (today, with the market at a historic high, it is still only 3.7). Most stocks with a ratio over 5 are generally considered expensive. By this standard, most mega-cap tech companies are currently overpriced: Nvidia is around 20, Alphabet 10, and Amazon — the cheapest among them — is less than 4. Even the notoriously overvalued Palantir has a P/S ratio only slightly above 60. Compared to SpaceX, these are bargain prices.