SpaceX Raises $75 Billion in IPO, Making Elon Musk a Trillionaire and Acquiring xAI

SpaceX completed an initial public offering that raised $75 billion and made Elon Musk a trillionaire. The company extended Musk’s lead as the world’s richest man while also creating new billionaires among longtime employees. 4 billion after the offering.

The 57-year-old Los Angeles native became a billionaire as a result of the IPO. Musk hired Johnsen as CFO in 2011. At the time, Musk stated that Johnsen’s experience would be invaluable for implementing financial standards and processes needed for a possible public company.

7 billion in revenue last year. Johnsen guided the company from a startup Musk once described as having a 10 percent chance of success to its current scale. 25 trillion.

Johnsen also helped arrange an agreement under which Anthropic will lend compute capacity to SpaceX’s Colossus data centers in Memphis, Tennessee. The company set aside 30 percent of its IPO shares for retail investors, a higher allocation than typical offerings. Johnsen will now articulate SpaceX’s role in space and artificial-intelligence sectors to a broad base of individual shareholders.

Johnsen, a University of Southern California accounting graduate who earned a master’s degree in finance from San Diego State University, currently sits on the USC board of trustees. He held a senior finance role at Broadcom for about a decade and later served as CFO of Mindspeed Technologies.

During the 2008 financial crisis at Mindspeed, Johnsen cut jobs and spending, restructured debt, sold technology patents, and raised cash by selling additional shares.

In three years at the company, he increased its valuation 15-fold. Johnsen maintains about 3,000 followers on X and has made no public posts. He told investor Gavin Baker that assured access to space is core to SpaceX’s business and enables Starlink, direct-to-cell service, and AI compute.