EX-SPACEX WELDER’S $10,000 STOCK OFFER BECAME $1 MILLION
A former SpaceX welder named Juan Hernandez had never heard of the company when a friend got him a job there in 2015, and the stock offer that came with it turned into a seven-figure stake. When SpaceX began trading on Nasdaq on June 12, 2026, Hernandez held roughly 6,500 shares worth $1,046,175 at the $160.95 closing price, CBS News reported.
Hernandez now works at Blue Origin, the rocket startup owned by Jeff Bezos. He told CBS correspondent Jo Ling Kent that he took the SpaceX job without knowing much about the place.
“I thought in my head, I don’t know what SpaceX is, but let’s go,” he said.
From a contract job to a seven-figure stake
A friend who had been hired as a welder at SpaceX knew Hernandez’s background and figured he would be a good fit. Hernandez saw it as routine work. “It was just another contract job for me at the time,” he said.
SpaceX hired him in 2015 and offered him $10,000 worth of stock, according to his account. His earlier hourly jobs had never come with stock, so he did not give it much thought.
“It wasn’t a big deal. I didn’t know anything about it then,” he said. “I didn’t know it was gonna be this big, at this point.”
He stayed about a decade. His welding work included building the structures that lifted rockets onto launch pads and the infrastructure that held them in place, and he eventually became a supervisor.
The Kansas City Star reported that SpaceX’s prospectus described employee equity as including stock-option grants at hiring and promotion milestones, annual performance awards and an employee stock-purchase plan.
Hernandez said that kind of ownership changes how people work. “They will perform a lot better because, I mean, it is, it’s their company as well,” he said.
Teaching the kids about investing
Hernandez is an immigrant to the United States, and he said he was taught to work hard. He told CBS the money will not get in the way of that, and he plans to keep working and pass those lessons on to his children.
He and his wife have three kids, ages six, 10 and 16. He has started teaching them how to invest based on what he learned from owning SpaceX stock. His 16-year-old daughter already owns shares in Meta and a handful of other companies.
“She’s a little entrepreneur herself,” he said.
The IPO also made SpaceX founder Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire, CBS reported, though Musk later lost that title. Asked what he would say to Musk, Hernandez said he would thank him for helping him realize a dream he did not know he had.
“He’s making all these lives much better and meaningful for their families as well,” Hernandez said.
Hernandez was far from the only worker cashing in on paper. Yahoo Finance reported that more than 4,400 current and former SpaceX employees became millionaires on paper when the company went public at $135 a share.
On paper is the key phrase. Another SpaceX employee told Fox Business that a lock-up period limited when workers could sell. “It’ll be great when the lock-up period is out, of course, and we can actually sell some of it and that’ll feel a little more into the wealth, but it’s a great day,” the employee said.
Spanish-language outlet Infobae reported that Hernandez sold part of his stake in 2020 to buy property in Texas. CBS did not mention that detail.
The share price did not hold at its first-day close. Yahoo Finance reported on July 12, 2026, that SpaceX shares had dropped to a low of $145.07, a price at which it estimated Hernandez’s roughly 6,500 shares were worth about $942,500.
