\n<\/p>\n
Andre Lavoie joined SpaceX in 2009 as an engineer, designing the pressure tanks that help power its rocket. He was paid partly in stock – a common trade-off at start-ups as a hiring incentive.<\/b><\/p>\n
Some 17 years on, those 200,000 shares he was given are worth about $23m (\u00a317m) – and the 63-year-old says he’s ready to start cashing them as soon as he can.<\/p>\n
“Every chance I get going forward, I’ll sell a little bit more,” he tells the BBC. <\/p>\n
“The shares have been going up so radically it keeps messing up my life plans – you really can’t know the future, so it’s better to sell early and in intervals.”<\/p>\n
Lavoie is far from being the only one who has seen the value of his stake in SpaceX rocket over the years. <\/p>\n
The company’s founder, Elon Musk, said on Fox News that SpaceX’s listing on the stock market in June<\/a> had likely made “several thousand” employees millionaires – including staff “who were working on the production line”.<\/p>\n According to reports, there are estimated to be 4,400 new millionaires created by the listing.<\/p>\n Unlike most newly-listed firms, SpaceX shares are set to be released in stages: the first 20% on 6 August, with more due in batches through the rest of the year.<\/p>\n Whether or not shareholders decide to sell their stake at the first opportunity is a matter for individuals. Unlike Lavoie, some may choose to hold onto their shares altogether in the hope of bigger gains later.<\/p>\n SpaceX listed on the Nasdaq in June, in the biggest initial public offering (IPO) in history, valuing the rocket and satellite firm at more than $2 trillion. <\/p>\n It briefly made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire,<\/a> before the stock cooled and his fortune slipped back below the milestone within weeks.<\/p>\n In its first results as a public company this week, the firm’s quarterly revenue was shown to have nearly doubled to $7.8bn (\u00a35.8bn) from a year earlier, while its spending ballooned to $18.3bn – more than six times what it was a year ago.<\/p>\n Overall, SpaceX made a net loss of $143m in the three months to June, and a loss of $2bn during the first six months of the year.<\/p>\n Musk pushed back against sceptics on an earnings call: “I think people are really underestimating Starlink”. He predicted the satellite internet service – the one part of the company that is currently making a profit – could one day deliver a majority of the world’s internet.<\/p>\n