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NewslettersCEO Daily

How Elon Musk sold a $1.77 trillion dream—and what other CEOs can learn from the SpaceX IPO

Diane Brady
By
Diane Brady
Diane Brady
Executive Editorial Director
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Diane Brady
By
Diane Brady
Diane Brady
Executive Editorial Director
Down Arrow Button Icon
June 12, 2026, 5:29 AM ET
Elon Musk is photographed at Space X in Brownsville, Texas
Elon Musk is photographed at Space X in Brownsville, Texas Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post via Getty Images
  • In today’s CEO Daily: We have liftoff!
  • The big leadership story: The chaos at CBS News shows the limits of ‘blow it up’ leadership.
  • The markets: Stocks rally globally on hopes for a U.S.-Iran peace deal.
  • Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. It’s SpaceX IPO day! Hooray? Odds are high that investors will clamor for some of the $75 billion worth of shares, a small sliver of equity that puts the market cap of Elon Musk’s aerospace and satellite company at an eye-watering $1.77 trillion. Never mind that Morningstar says it’s being optimistic in valuing the stock at $63, or 53% below that IPO price. BlackRock alone has reportedly put in a $5 billion order to get a piece of this money-losing operation that has ambitions to, among other things, put a million people on Mars.

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What can leaders learn from this sci-fi thriller that they can adapt into their own playbook? Well, maybe a few things.

You don’t have to be shareholder-friendly to get shareholders excited. Governance experts were outraged when Google went public in 2004 under a dual-class structure, which gives more power or votes to one class of shareholders. As founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page wrote at the time: “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.” In other words, if you don’t like it, don’t buy it. (If you’d invested $1,000 then, you’d have around $75,000 today.) Fast forward to SpaceX, and dual-class structures are now common in tech IPOs, reinforcing the myth that founders know best how to steer their public companies and giving shareholders almost no choice over how the company is governed. Case in point: Musk can’t be fired as CEO of SpaceX. Ever.

The power of storytelling. Forget about what’s actually in the prospectus, such as the fact that more than three-quarters of capital raised today will be used for debt repayment, or that analysts say SpaceX would have to generate $1.1 trillion in revenue and $250 billion in profits to justify its lofty market cap. That’s the Debbie Downer take. I remember how excited I was when Elon Musk talked to me 15 years ago about his vision to make humanity multi-planetary. Anyone can understand and rally around that vision. Maybe that’s why Musk allocated 30% of the shares to retail investors. As the New York State Lottery used to say, all it takes is a dollar and a dream. Make that $135, probably in tranches of 100 shares.

The power of personality. It’s hard to replicate the magic and the myth that is Elon Musk, though he’s likely to have a lot of offspring you could eventually hire. Did Elon Musk bring efficiency to the U.S. government as the man from DOGE? No. Has he been a great leader at all the other companies he’s run? Debatable, though the Tesla board certainly didn’t mind giving hima “moonshot” pay package. But Musk does understand the value of being out there, articulating a vision and taking risks that earn him friends and foes. To some extent, that’s the founder’s prerogative. Contrast that with the anodyne press releases and carefully calibrated comments that turn leadership into a triumph of the boring. On that note, let me end with what Anduril cofounder Matt Grimm told my colleague Allie Garfinkle a few months ago: “How many people think that they have bought into SpaceX, but they’re actually just funding some dude’s coke habit in Miami? The number is not zero.” In this case, skepticism may be running high, and it may not matter. We have liftoff.

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

Top leadership news

The limits of disruptive leadership

Bari Weiss has thrown CBS News into turmoil since taking over as editor-in-chief, most recently firing 60 Minutes anchor Scott Pelley and upending the storied broadcast, even as it wins the ratings war. "A generation of people actually believe that disruption is virtue, and that's an enormous mistake," says Harvard Kennedy School senior lecturer Ronald Heifetz.

The real hurdle to enterprise AI

Most companies are getting AI wrong, spending 93 cents of every dollar on technology while neglecting the human side, according to executives who spoke at Fortune Brainstorm Tech. Just 20% of companies are capturing nearly three-quarters of AI's total economic value, said Deloitte vice chair China Widener.

Citadel’s uber-competitive internship

More than 115,000 people applied for a Citadel internship this year yet only 350 got in, an acceptance rate of 0.36%. The 350 interns who made the cut earn up to $5,800 a week, plus a $15,000 housing stipend.

The markets

S&P 500 futures are up 0.32% this morning. The last session closed up 1.75%. The STOXX Europe 600 was up 1.75% in early trading. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was up 1.37% in early trading. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was up 2.81%. South Korea’s KOSPI is up 4.63% today. China’s CSI 300 was up 1.16%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was up 1.93%. India’s NIFTY 50 was up 1.83%. Bitcoin was at $63K.

Around the watercooler

Exclusive: Consumer device giant LG Electronics to launch blockchain to place and sell ads by Jack Kubinec and Ben Weiss

‘China follows Musk very closely’: While SpaceX blocked Chinese investors from IPO, China’s space firms prep their own as a counterweight by Mia Osmonbekov

Abridge wants to be the operating system for medicine—and NVIDIA and Eli Lilly are helping build it by Lily Mae Lazarus

Silicon Valley insiders warn U.S. defense supply chain is unprepared for modern warfare by Sebastian Herrera

As SpaceX goes public, a $100 billion shadow market faces a reckoning by Allie Garfinkle

CEO Daily is curated and edited by Joseph Abrams, Jason Ma, Claire Zillman, and Lee Clifford.

This is the web version of CEO Daily, a newsletter of must-read global insights from CEOs and industry leaders. Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox.
About the Author
Diane Brady
By Diane BradyExecutive Editorial Director
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Diane Brady writes about the issues and leaders impacting the global business landscape. In addition to writing Fortune’s CEO Daily newsletter, she co-hosts the Leadership Next podcast, interviews newsmakers on stage at events worldwide and oversees the Fortune CEO Initiative. She previously worked at Forbes, McKinsey, Bloomberg Businessweek, the Wall Street Journal, and Maclean's. Her book Fraternity was named one of Amazon’s best books of 2012, and she also co-wrote Connecting the Dots with former Cisco CEO John Chambers.

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