On June 12, 2026, SpaceX became a public company through an IPO (Initial Public Offer), selling shares on a stock exchange for the first time. It listed on the Nasdaq at $135 a share, raising $75 billion and valuing the company at about $1.77 trillion, the largest IPO in history. It made Elon Musk the first person ever recorded to be worth a trillion dollars on paper.
But Elon Musk is no longer a trillionaire, with his net worth dropping back down to roughly $700-$740 billion. Though he remains the richest person by a wide margin, his trillion-dollar status lasted only briefly.
According to the investment platform Hiive, more than 4,400 current and former employees became dollar millionaires because of their shares, and about 400 became worth over $100 million each.
By comparison, Google’s 2004 IPO and Facebook’s 2012 IPO each created around 1,000 employee millionaires in dollars. SpaceX beat both combined. This wealth was not only for engineers.
Juan Hernandez, for example, joined SpaceX as a contract welder in 2015, earning about $28 an hour. He took some of his pay in stock instead of cash and kept buying more with his pay cheque.
On IPO day, his roughly 6,500 shares were worth over $1 million. Before that, SpaceX had let employees sell shares back to the company every six months for years, including a December 2024 sale at a $350 billion valuation.
This is what a share option is supposed to do: reward years of work with part-ownership of the company.
Now compare it to what happened to Rafiq Suleman at Tugende, a Ugandan asset financing company. He was promised shares too.
When he tried to claim them but lost everything. SpaceX’s plan worked because the United States has decades of strong laws around share options, and because SpaceX itself built a system involving regular share sale events, then a clear path to a stock market listing, that let employees turn shares into real cash. Tugende had no such system.
No law forced it to build one, and there was no company process for paying for the shares. Suleman joined Tugende as a financial analyst in August 2017.
His contract promised him 1,000 shares, a third vesting after one year and the rest in six-monthly instalments. By the time he resigned in August 2019, 333 shares had vested, worth $16,500 at the time.
He said he was willing to pay for them, but was never given the mechanism to do so. When he took the matter to court, he lost.
The judge found the contract vague on the timing of payment, but ruled that because Suleman had not paid or formally demanded the shares in writing before his employment formally ended on December 1, 2018, when he moved to a consultancy arrangement, meaning his right to them had lapsed.
What is a share option?
A share option is a promise: the right to buy a share later, at a price agreed today. Picture a voucher that says, ‘You may buy one share for $7.’
If the company grows and the share becomes worth $50, the voucher is now valuable. To get the share, you must ‘exercise’ the option by paying the agreed price and complete the paperwork.
An unused option eventually expires worthless. Companies offer options for two reasons: to give employees a stake in long-term success, not just a salary, and to let a cash-poor company offer something valuable instead of a high wage.
Shares usually ‘vest’, which is to say release gradually over time, to keep people from leaving early. Do so, and you lose what hasn’t vested yet.
These ideas are the same everywhere. What differs by country is everything around the promise: clear laws, settled tax rules, a regulator, and court cases that have already answered the hard questions.
How SpaceX built a working system
SpaceX was private until June 2026, so employees couldn’t sell shares on the open market. Instead, the company built its own system, like regular tender offers, roughly every six months, at company-set prices, letting employees cash out vested shares again and again over the years.
The 2026 IPO then gave them a clear time-bound path to sell publicly. All of this sits on decades of established US securities and tax law, so disputes are rare and usually about minor details, not whether the employee is owed anything at all.
Kenya and South Africa laws
Kenya treats Employee Share Ownership Plans as a proper legal category. A company can register its plan with the Capital Markets Authority and the tax authority for clear treatment.
A 2022 law change means tax applies only when the employee exercises the option, when they actually gain value, not earlier, at vesting.
South Africa goes further. Section 97 of its Companies Act sets out what a company must do for its share plan to qualify officially, including registering the plan’s rules with the regulator and naming someone responsible for compliance.
That law specifies how the scheme must be run before it can operate, not just how the outcome is taxed. This is why the Ugandan judge in the Tugende case leaned on South African and Kenyan court decisions.
Uganda had no law like either, and no local case law on this topic until April 2025. Stronger laws like these would likely have helped Suleman’s case. But not every lawyer agrees that better laws are what Uganda needs most.