The Former SpaceX Welder Whose $10,000 Stock Grant Became $1,046,175

A Mexico-born welder named Juan Hernandez joined SpaceX in 2015 for $28 an hour and a $10,000 stock grant he did not think much of at the time. Just over a decade later, those 6,500 shares closed Friday worth $1,046,175 when SpaceX began trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX. The $75 billion offering, the largest IPO in U.S. history, made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire and turned SpaceX’s hourly workforce into the kind of stakeholder class most public companies reserve for executives.

Hernandez was a contractor welder who rose to supervisor and now works at Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin. In an exclusive CBS News interview, he told correspondent Jo Ling Kent that for years he did not know what SpaceX was and did not think the stock grant was a big deal. His story is the human side of the $75 billion SpaceX IPO. He is one of roughly 4,400 current and former employees who walked away from Friday’s session as millionaires.

The $10,000 Wager SpaceX Asked Him to Hold

Hernandez heard about SpaceX from a friend who had just been hired there as a welder and figured Hernandez’s background made him a good fit. “I thought in my head, I don’t know what SpaceX is, but let’s go,” he told CBS News correspondent Jo Ling Kent in a broadcast interview that aired this week. SpaceX hired him that year.

The job came with a $10,000 stock grant, a benefit Hernandez’s earlier hourly contract work had never offered. “It wasn’t a big deal. I didn’t know anything about it then,” he said. He did not know it was going to be this big. The grant tracked SpaceX from a single workhorse rocket to a 165-launch-a-year operation.

The dollar value re-rated with every private funding round, but the welder who received it had no way to know. Under the typical SpaceX compensation structure, his shares vested gradually and the position stayed illiquid for nearly a decade. The bet that the stock would be worth holding was the company’s wager, not his. When SpaceX filed its S-1 in 2026, the equity Hernandez had been granted was no longer a private wager on a future IPO. Hernandez’s first-person account of his SpaceX stock grant traces the path from contractor to millionaire in his own words.

A Decade of Welds, Then a Move to Blue Origin

Hernandez spent ten years at SpaceX. He worked as a welder, building the launch structures that lifted rockets onto the pad and the ground infrastructure that held them in place. He eventually rose through the ranks to become a supervisor.

The compensation philosophy is rare in manufacturing-heavy businesses, and rarer in companies of SpaceX’s size. Stock-heavy pay, applied to welders, cooks, and machinists as well as engineers, is how SpaceX kept entry-level manufacturing wages at $28 an hour for welders like Hernandez while still drawing the labor it needed. The mechanic, applied across the company, is what makes the welder a stakeholder and the founder a CEO.

Hernandez now works at Blue Origin, the Jeff Bezos-owned rocket startup that competes with his former employer. He took his 6,500 SpaceX shares with him, and they kept re-rating as the company moved toward a public listing. The 6,500 shares, granted a decade earlier, had been a paper position on a private cap table through Starlink’s growth, the February merger with xAI, and a parade of valuation step-ups. By the time the SPCX ticker printed on Friday, those shares were worth a seven-figure sum on the open market.

The bet SpaceX has been running since 2002 has applied to hourly manufacturing wages as much as to engineering offers. Hernandez is one of the welders, cooks, and machinists who became millionaires on Friday.

Friday’s Close at $160.95, and a 19% Pop

SpaceX shares opened at $150 on the Nasdaq on Friday morning and closed at $160.95, a 19% gain on the first day of trading. The session briefly took SpaceX’s market value above $2.25 trillion, as recounted in the IPO’s first trading day close at $160.95. Musk rang the Nasdaq opening bell from the company’s Starbase, Texas headquarters alongside hundreds of employees.

I gave SpaceX a less than 10% chance of succeeding at all. Let me tell you, if people had told me this was gonna happen, I was like, man, you must be smoking some really good crack, because I think this company’s gonna fail.

Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, delivered the remarks from the Nasdaq podium in New York on Friday morning, before trading began. The 19% first-day pop is the kind of debut that turns paper stakes into real ones. For Hernandez, the close translated a stake Yahoo’s analysis had pegged at roughly $880,000 at the $135 offering price into a seven-figure sum by 4 p.m. Friday. The welder’s paper bet had paid out by closing bell.

The 555.6 million shares SpaceX sold at $135 raised about $75 billion, the largest IPO in U.S. history, with Goldman Sachs leading the underwriting syndicate. SpaceX set aside 30% of the offering for retail investors through Fidelity, E-Trade, Charles Schwab, and SoFi. Hernandez, who never bought or sold a share, was on the other side of the trade. The same re-ratings that produced his payout also built Cathie Wood’s ARK Venture Fund position in SpaceX. Friday’s print is the first public price for both positions.

• $1,046,175 – Hernandez’s stake at Friday’s close
• 6,500 – SpaceX shares Hernandez holds
• $160.95 – Friday closing price, 19% above the $135 IPO
• $75 billion – raised in the IPO, the largest in U.S. history
• ~4,400 – current and former employees turned millionaires

The 4,400 Millionaires Behind the Headlines

The number of SpaceX employees who became millionaires on Friday is closer to 4,400 than to 4, according to an analysis by Hill.com, a San Francisco-based investment platform, first reported by the New York Times. The analysis estimates that ~400 current and former SpaceX employees now hold stakes worth $100 million or more. The ranks include SpaceX Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell and Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen, whose stakes are each reported to be worth more than $1 billion, per the Financial Times. The breakdown of the Hill.com analysis of SpaceX employee stakes gives the full picture.

The directors of the company have done even better. Antonio Gracias, a SpaceX director and the founder of Valor Equity Partners, holds the largest single director stake. Luke Nosek, another director, holds a stake of similar vintage.

• ~4,400 – current and former SpaceX employees expected to become millionaires
• ~400 – employees with stakes worth $100 million or more
• $1 billion+ – stakes held by COO Gwynne Shotwell and CFO Bret Johnsen, per the FT
• $65 billion – director Antonio Gracias’s stake
• $5 billion – director Luke Nosek’s stake

What the Bet Actually Costs the Holder

The bet that paid out on Friday comes with strings the welder’s new wealth cannot escape. Standard lockup restrictions prevent employees from selling their shares for 90 to 180 days after the listing, meaning the paper value will stay paper for months. SpaceX’s controlling shareholder accepted a 366-day lockup on his stake, with other insiders on a staggered schedule that lets up to 20% of locked stock trade after the first post-listing quarterly report.

Other insiders sit on a staggered schedule that lets up to 20% of locked stock trade after the first post-listing quarterly report. The structural detail matters because the new wealth is concentrated in a single position. One former employee, the analysis notes, holds a $21.4 million stake that represents 93% of his household’s investable net worth, the kind of single-position exposure that turns a paper gain into a paper loss if the post-lockup price slips. The trade-off the equity arrangement has always carried is concentration risk, and the new millionaires are sitting on it. Morningstar values SpaceX at $780 billion, roughly 2.2 times lower than the $1.77 trillion valuation implied by the IPO price. SpaceX’s super-voting structure concentrates 82% of the votes with the founder, meaning the new millionaires will have negligible influence over corporate decisions. The market mechanics of the listing itself also matter: the $50 billion in forced selling the IPO may trigger could pressure the price in the months before the lockup expires.

What the Money Is For

Hernandez, for his part, has not changed his plans. He said he will keep working at Blue Origin. The seven-figure balance in his brokerage account is not the thing he is most interested in talking about.

They will perform a lot better because, I mean, it is, it’s their company as well.

Juan Hernandez, who worked as a welder at SpaceX and rose to supervisor, said the words in a broadcast interview with CBS News that aired Friday. What he is most interested in is the conversation he is having with his three children, ages 6, 10, and 16. His 16-year-old daughter is already a stakeholder in Meta and a handful of other companies, and he is teaching her how to invest based on what he learned owning SpaceX stock. He is teaching the math: a private position, ten years of holding, then one public close.

“As an immigrant, I was taught to work hard,” Hernandez said. The work came first, and the work continues. The newfound wealth will not get in the way of that. If given the chance, he said he would thank the man who built a system that let him in. The thank-you is for the structure, not the stock.