By https://www.abc.net.au/news/alan-kohler/167112
Publication Date: 2026-06-14 18:43:00
In 2010, around the time of Tesla’s IPO, an acquaintance proudly showed me his red Tesla Roadster, the first to be imported into Australia.
It was a beautiful little rocket, the first electric vehicle of the modern era, discontinued in 2012 after laying the technical and financial groundwork for the Model S and eventually SpaceX.
The company had sold just 1,000 of them in 2010 and was making a loss, but took it public for $1.7 billion and then rose 40 percent on its first day of trading, the first sign of Elon Musk’s Pied Piper power over investors.
The latest and ultimate sign of this came on Friday with SpaceX’s stock market debut.
The company had gone public a few days earlier at $1.77 trillion, almost exactly 1,000 times that of Tesla, and traded 20 percent higher on the first day, giving it a valuation of $2.1 trillion…
