How Teslas Stock Listing in 2010 Enabled SpaceXs I.P.O.

Tesla had sold barely 1,000 cars when the company’s chief executive, an up-and-coming entrepreneur named Elon Musk, rang the opening bell at Nasdaq in June 2010.The initial public offering valued Tesla at $1.7 billion even though the company’s only product was its two-seat Roadster, which had a starting price of $100,000 and took seven hours to charge.Some prominent Wall Street figures were deeply skeptical.“Tesla is a sell, sell, sell,” Jim Cramer, the CNBC host, told viewers.

“You don’t want to own this stock.”Tesla and Mr.Musk have come a long way.Now he is asking investors to value SpaceX, where he is also chief executive, at $1.77 trillion, or more than a thousand times what Tesla was worth in 2010.

The SpaceX listing is expected to raise $75 billion for the company.Tesla’s listing raised $226 million, far less than it had received in federal government loans.Mr.

Musk is much better known than he was in 2010.As the world’s richest person, he has become a lightning rod for anti-billionaire sentiment.

He owns the social media site X, which he uses to broadcast right-wing political views.But the Tesla stock listing and its share price’s stunning rise in recent years helped create an aura of mystique around Mr.Musk.

To his many admirers on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, he is a genius who has made loyal investors insanely wealthy while disrupting the auto industry and spaceflight.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe....