SpaceX has delivered the largest stock market launch in history, turning its South African-born founder Elon Musk into the first trillionaire in history and reshaping global markets. Yet in the country of his birth, there has been little public celebration of what is one of the most dramatic financial events ever linked to a South African-born entrepreneur.

SpaceX went public on Friday, in a $75 billion initial public offering on the Nasdaq, trading under the ticker SPCX. The company priced its shares at $135, raised $75 billion, and closed its first day at $160.95, up 19.2%.

That first-day surge pushed SpaceX’s market valuation beyond $2.1 trillion, making it the sixth-largest listed company in the world.

The listing also pushed Musk’s net worth beyond $1 trillion, making him the first person in history to cross that threshold. Musk retained control of most of the company’s voting shares and did not sell personal equity during the listing.

The scale of the listing shattered previous global records. SpaceX raised more than twice the amount secured by Saudi Aramco in 2019, which had previously held the record for the world’s largest initial public offering (IPO).

The company’s valuation is being driven by a mix of businesses that now reach far beyond rockets. Its Starlink satellite internet division has become a major revenue engine, while its launch business gives it a deep strategic advantage in space infrastructure. The listing also revealed the extent to which SpaceX is positioning itself as an artificial intelligence and space data company, with xAI and X folded into the broader corporate structure.

Investors are therefore not simply buying into a rocket company. They are buying into a vast technology ecosystem built around launch capacity, satellite internet, artificial intelligence, orbital infrastructure, and long-term space industrialisation.

The man behind all of that was born in Pretoria and is the most consequential business and economic figure South Africa has produced. Yet South Africa has not appeared to celebrate him in the way most countries would celebrate a native-born figure who has achieved as much.

The reasons for that silence are political and cultural. South Africa’s economy is in many respects the opposite of what Musk has built at SpaceX. This newspaper reported last week how South Africa’s share of GDP contributed by manufacturing is at just half of global averages. The country’s investment rate is also half of the emerging market average. Its unemployment rate is five times the global average. Where Musk has built his company around merit, excellence, and capital risk-taking, South Africa’s government has sought to build its economy around state regulation, rent-seeking, an explicit aversion to merit, and the pursuit of equity, not excellence.

Where Musk has himself made these points, South African actors from across the political spectrum and across the media have been scathing in their criticism of him, going as far as to call him a Nazi and to say that his Starlink internet system is not welcome in the country.

The consequences have never been starker than they were this month – as Musk was celebrated globally South Africa’s government hunkered down ahead of a 30 June deadline set by xenophobic agitators for all foreign migrants, who are in South Africa illegally, to leave the country following the charge that via their meagre little shops and often demeaning, backbreaking jobs they had robbed South Africans of the chance at a better life.