SpaceX shares surged as much as 30% on Friday, reaching over $2.25 trillion in market capitalization and making Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire.
Though it’s now headquartered in Texas, SpaceX still has many ties to California and the Bay Area. The world’s largest initial public offering is expected to boost California wallets and state tax coffers, enriching over 7,600 Hawthorne (Los Angeles County) SpaceX workers — though not as much as Musk’s financial bonanza.
SpaceX subsidiary xAI is headquartered in Palo Alto and has a San Francisco office in the Mission, coincidentally the ex-headquarters of OpenAI, which is also moving to go public. (Musk co-founded OpenAI and paid its rent.) SpaceX’s X division (formerly Twitter) has offices in Palo Alto and San Jose. SpaceX has 21,000 global employees, but it isn’t clear how many employees the xAI and X subsidiaries have…