Good morning. Elon Musk’s SpaceX will break records (and Wall Street’s rules) when it goes public tomorrow – more on that below, along with Ottawa’s social media ban and Bill Gates’s closed-door Epstein hearing. But first:

SpaceX will be the world's largest IPO. Jeenah Moon/Reuters

Elon Musk has a lot of ambitions. He wants to occupy Mars. He wants to repopulate Earth, starting with his own 14 children. He desperately – desperately – wants to be seen as funny. And he wants to become the world’s first trillionaire, which will almost certainly happen tomorrow when his company SpaceX goes public.

Here’s how that works. After two decades of raising billions from private investors, Musk has decided his rocket-ship-and-satellite-internet-and-now-also-AI conglomerate should dip into an even larger pool of capital. Once SpaceX debuts on the stock market tomorrow, the general public can for the first time buy a piece of the company.

More than 555 million shares will be up for purchase at US$135 each, meaning SpaceX’s initial public offering could raise a whopping US$75-billion, making it the biggest IPO in history. This seems a safe bet: Demand from investors is reportedly four times greater than the number of shares available. And since those shares represent barely 4 per cent of the company, a little back-of-the-napkin math says the whole thing is worth US$1.77-trillion – easily putting SpaceX among the 10 most valuable companies in the world.

As for Musk, he’s already worth somewhere in the neighbourhood of US$700-billion, at least twice as much as his nearest competitor, Google co-founder Larry Page. Even after tomorrow’s IPO, Musk owns almost half the total shares of SpaceX, and as its value catapults, so does his, all the way past US$1-trillion.

Can we just pause for a second on how staggeringly rich that is? One trillion dollars is one million million dollars. If you spent $1-million a day, it would take you more than 2,700 years to blow through a trillion. If you spent $1-million an hour, it’d still take more than a century to use up all that cash. One trillion dollars buys you pretty much every sports team on the planet. One trillion dollars makes you the planet’s 21st-richest country.

You'll remember this photo. Brian Snyder/Reuters

It also makes you rich enough to break Wall Street’s rules. “SpaceX’s IPO is different and kind of wacky in all kinds of ways,” James Bradshaw, The Globe’s institutional investing reporter, told me. A company will usually huddle with its bankers to determine a range for its share price, which it then runs past investors before finalizing a number right before the IPO. Musk skipped all that: SpaceX will cost US$135 a share, take it or leave it.

And he’s so confident everyone will take it that he’s changed who can buy those shares, as well. Typically, 90 to 95 per cent are reserved for banks, pension funds and other major investors – but Musk is making up to 30 per cent available to regular folks. “He needs a lot of investors to digest the shares he’s dumping into the market,” Bradshaw said. “And Musk has an intensely loyal fanbase who’ve proven with Tesla they’re not that sensitive to how expensive this gets.”

There’s more: Public companies normally face a long cooling-off period before they’re added to the big stock indexes, since the months after an IPO can be so unstable. But Musk persuaded several indexes, including the Nasdaq 100, to bend their rules and list SpaceX within days of going public. (The S&P 500 held firm. ) Because of that, index funds – which are large stock portfolios that mirror the composition of an index – will quickly need to go on a SpaceX buying spree, competing with other investors and driving up the price.

Do you invest in an index fund? Does your pension plan? It’s entirely likely, given index funds are such a popular and inexpensive way to own the entire market. And that means you’re about to become a part-owner of SpaceX, whether you’d want to or not. But a little ownership doesn’t get you much of anything: Musk’s shares come with special voting rights that effectively hand him control of 85 per cent of SpaceX. “He can’t be fired as CEO. He’s made it harder for shareholders to have oversight or sue in court,” Bradshaw told me. “He’s just got a complete iron grip over this company.”

SpaceX isn’t actually a profitable business. It lost nearly US$5-billion last year on revenues of US$18.7-billion; only Starlink, its communications network, earned any money in 2026’s first three months. But a company is worth whatever people are willing to pay for it, and tomorrow, a whole bunch of investors will fork over enough to make Musk a trillionaire – then we all cross our fingers that their big bet pays off.

Yo Cusano wins their heat in last month's minivan race in Surrey, B.C. Jennifer Gauthier/The Globe and Mail

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