SpaceX's (SPCX) June stock market debut was the most envied payday of 2026. Shares were priced at $135, and an analysis by the investment platform Hill.com, reported by Fortune and The New York Times, estimated that more than 4,000 current and former employees became millionaires on paper. Grant Cardone, in a clip posted to his YouTube channel in September, looked at one of those new millionaires and delivered a verdict: "She's broke. She's broke now. She just doesn't know it."
The employee is hypothetical. Cardone calls her Helen. "Let's just take Helen that works at SpaceX that got a million dollars yesterday, okay?" he said. "If she sells her stock, but she can't, by the way, but if she did, she'd sell her stock, she'd pay $400,000 in taxes, she has 600 grand left," and, as he put it, "she has 600 grand left to live on for 30 years." The interview appears to have been recorded during IPO week in June, when Cardone said Elon Musk had minted "4,800 millionaires" in a matter of days, a figure that is his own and runs a little higher than the published estimate.
