When Juan Hernandez took a job as a welder at SpaceX in 2015, he did not know what the company was. A friend had tipped him off — said there was work, said his hands would be useful there. So Hernandez showed up, the way working men do: without ceremony, without expectations, ready to earn his keep.
“It was just another contract job for me at the time,” he said.
More than a decade later, that ordinary decision has produced an extraordinary outcome.
SpaceX, the rocket and satellite company founded by Elon Musk, made its long-anticipated debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange last Friday under the ticker symbol SPCX, in an initial public offering that valued the company at $75 billion. By the time trading closed, shares were sitting at $160.95. For Hernandez, who accumulated roughly 6,500 shares during his ten years at the company, that closing price translated to a personal holding worth just over one million dollars — $1,046,175, to be precise.
The man who once clocked in not knowing what SpaceX was is now, by any reasonable definition, a millionaire.
How It Happened
Hernandez joined SpaceX as a welder at a time when the company was already building a reputation as one of the most ambitious aerospace ventures in American history, but had not yet become the cultural and financial phenomenon it is today. His work was foundational in the literal sense — he built the structures that lifted rockets onto launch pads, constructed the infrastructure that held them in place as they prepared to leave the earth.
When SpaceX offered him $10,000 worth of stock as part of his compensation, he accepted without fully understanding what he was accepting. It was not something he had ever been offered before.
“I didn’t know anything about it then,” he said. “I didn’t know it was gonna be this big, at this point.”
Over the years, Hernandez rose through the ranks, eventually becoming a supervisor. He stayed a decade — long enough to watch those early stock grants grow, split, and compound in value through private funding rounds that quietly pushed SpaceX’s valuation into the stratosphere long before it ever reached Wall Street.
He has since moved on, and now works at Blue Origin, the rocket startup owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. But the shares he earned at SpaceX came with him.
The Bigger Picture
The IPO did not only make Hernandez wealthy. It made Elon Musk the first person in recorded history to cross the one trillion dollar threshold in personal net worth — a milestone that generated as many headlines as the listing itself. Musk, who founded SpaceX in 2002 with the stated ambition of making humanity a multi-planetary species, has now translated that ambition into a valuation the financial world had not previously seen attached to a single individual.
For Hernandez, though, the story is less about Musk and more about what the company’s structure made possible for the people who showed up and did the work. He believes that giving employees equity — a stake, however small, in the outcome — changes how they perform.
“They will perform a lot better because it is their company as well,” he said.
Staying Grounded
Despite the life-changing sum now attached to his name, Hernandez says he has no intention of stopping work. He is a U.S. immigrant, and he speaks about hard work the way people do when it has been both survival and identity — not as a burden, but as something passed down.
He is already passing it on. His three children — aged six, ten, and sixteen — are being raised with lessons about money, investment, and ownership that he learned the long way. His sixteen-year-old daughter has already invested in Meta and several other companies.
“She’s a little entrepreneur herself,” he said.
If he ever found himself face to face with Elon Musk, Hernandez said he would not ask for anything. He would simply say thank you — for building something that made room for a welder from outside the orbit of wealth and finance to own a piece of it.
“He made it a possibility for somebody like us, you know, the cook or the electrician,” Hernandez said. “He’s making all these lives much better and meaningful for their families as well.”
It is a sentiment that will resonate far beyond California. In a world where ordinary workers are routinely excluded from the wealth they help create, the story of a man who welded rockets and quietly became a millionaire carries a power that no press release about a billion-dollar IPO quite captures on its own.
Source: CBS News. Original reporting by Jo Ling Kent, Mary Cunningham, and Maya Blackstone. Additional reporting by Emily Pandise.