Thursday, December 13, 2012

Elon Musk Gets IPO At SolarCity; SpaceX Next

Technology mogul Elon Musk has made huge waves in Southern California with his success at Hawthorne-based commercial rocket and spaceflight company SpaceX. However, Musk also has his hands in a number of other companies, including Foster City-based SolarCity, which just had a successful IPO this morning. SolarCity is a provider of power purchase agreements (PPAs), used to finance solar power installations, which just debuted on the NASDAQ Global Market as SCTY. SolarCity debuted at $8.00 per share and was trading as high as $11.00 in morning trading Thursday. SolarCity is not Musk's first successful IPO: he also founded Tesla Motors (IPO in June of 2010), and sold PayPal way back in 2002 for $1.5 billion. Musk said on Twitter that he believes SpaceX will go public at some point saying that "it should ultimately be owned primarily by the public".