On the morning of Friday, June 13, 2026, Elon Musk stood in front of a cheering crowd at SpaceX's company town in Starbase, Texas, and said something that stopped people in their tracks.
"I gave SpaceX a less than 10 percent chance of succeeding at all," he told the assembled staff. "If people had told me this was gonna happen, you must be smoking some really good crack, because I think this company's gonna fail."
Minutes later, SpaceX began trading on the Nasdaq. By the time the closing bell rang, the company was worth $2.1 trillion — and Musk had raised $75 billion in the largest initial public offering in stock market history, a sum roughly triple the size of the next-biggest U.S. IPO on record.
The world spent the rest of the day trying to make sense of the numbers. The stock was priced at $135 a share, opened at $150, rose to roughly $176 at its peak, and closed around $161. Headlines called it historic. Financial analysts debated the valuation. Cable news ran the ticker in a loop.
But buried underneath all the spectacle was a more quietly remarkable thing: a founder who genuinely believed he was going to fail — and kept building anyway.
That's not a footnote to the SpaceX story. It might be the whole story.
