SpaceX’s biggest winners — from Elon Musk’s friend to a former $28-an-hour welder in Mexico

SpaceX’s historic debut is expected to generate billions of dollars for Elon Musk’s close friends and longtime supporters — just as it creates a new class of millionaires among SpaceX’s top employees.

Among the latter is Juan Hernandez, a former SpaceX welder who took a $28-an-hour job at the company in 2015 after immigrating from Mexico — and is now poised to receive $880,000 in Friday’s IPO at $135 a share, according to the Wall Street Journal.

With shares trading north of $170 as of Friday afternoon, the 42-year-old Hernandez’s stake was worth north of $1 million.

“I didn’t even know what SpaceX was when my friend talked about it” in the 2010s, Hernandez told the newspaper.

At the other end of the spectrum, Antonio Gracias, Musk’s 55-year-old close friend and longtime Tesla investor, was poised to receive $68 billion in cash, with his firm Valor Equity Partners becoming SpaceX’s second-largest shareholder.

Shares of SpaceX opened at $150 each on its first day of trading on Friday in the largest IPO ever. They soon hit $170, boosting the company’s market value to more than $2.1 billion — and crowning Musk the world’s first billionaire.

Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund was one of the first investors in SpaceX, investing $600 million in the company in 2008.

Now, that slug is worth $50 billion. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz’s stake in the company is now worth more than $10 billion, while Sequoia Capital’s is valued at $20 billion.

But the IPO is expected to turn more than 4,400 current and former SpaceX employees into overnight millionaires — with about 400 expected to earn $100 million or more, according to a Hill.com analysis previously reported by the New York Times.

Few SpaceX employees embody the company’s meteoric rise better than Trevor Hise, who accepted an internship at SpaceX in 2011 against the advice of his parents, who urged him to join General Electric instead.

“At the time, there was a lot of perception that SpaceX was an unproven startup that wouldn’t last long,” Hise told the New York Times.

The gamble paid off.

During his 12 years at SpaceX as a launch engineer, Hise amassed more than 100,000 shares — occasionally selling shares to pay for milestones like his wedding and a down payment on a house.

But the rest of his stake is worth at least $13.5 million based on the IPO price, the Times said.

“The enormity of this was ridiculous,” said Hise, 37, who considers himself retired after leaving SpaceX in 2023 and works as a real estate investor.

Hise said he and his wife, an artist, hired a financial planner and created a foundation to donate their newfound wealth. As for the parents who were worried that he was overriding a stable job with a dangerous startup?

“They are very proud,” Hise told the newspaper.

J. André Lavoie, 63, a former SpaceX engineer, holds a stake worth more than $28 million — which would help him finish renovations on a hotel in northern Italy he bought after moving overseas five years ago, according to the Journal.

He’s also thinking about using some of his newfound wealth to help the Italian city where he lives switch from burning wood to clean heating – adding, “I don’t want to just die with a bunch of money in the bank.”

Gavin Petit, 42, the former SpaceX engineer who oversaw the launch, holds more than 50,000 shares — enough to make him several million dollars, according to the Times.

The SpaceX startup is “the Coca-Cola or Google IPO of my time,” Petit said, comparing it to winning the lottery — after he chose to take his company’s stock bonuses over the years, widely considered a risky move.

After joining the company, Hernandez received about $10,000 worth of company stock and continued to buy more shares through deductions — sometimes selling some of his assets to buy Texas property and start a small business with his wife.

“It put me in a comfortable place to live,” said Hernandez, who left SpaceX last year and now works for Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ rival space company.

Shareholders will not be able to sell their pre-IPO shares for several months during a blackout period intended to prevent mass outflows, although some employees may be able to sell a small portion of shares as soon as July.

“No one would have expected this 20 years ago,” Justin Fishner-Wolfson, who has been building shares of SpaceX for more than 15 years, told the Times.

In 2008, then a 26-year-old junior employee at Thiel’s Founders Fund, Fishner-Wolfson was assigned to test his new investment in SpaceX — where he watched live video of the company’s third rocket relaunch attempt crash and burst into flames.

His venture capital firm, 137 Ventures, has been accumulating shares of SpaceX since 2011 and has never sold any stock. It now owns more than 1% of SpaceX, which is worth about $20 billion.

“This is going to define my career a lot,” he told the Times.