SpaceX nearly went bankrupt in 2008, and yesterday it went public with an IPO valued at $1.77 trillion.
Here is the story of the largest IPO in history and the world’s first trillionaire, Elon Musk.
In 1999, Elon Musk sold his first company, Zip2, for $300 million. He then co-founded PayPal, which eBay acquired in 2002 for $1.5 billion. Musk received approximately $180 million from the sale.
Most people might have stopped there. But he was obsessed with sending humans to Mars. When he looked into buying rockets from Russia and found the costs prohibitively high, he decided to build them himself.
In March 2002, he founded SpaceX in California and invested roughly $100 million of his own money.
SpaceX operated out of a warehouse in El Segundo,…