Everyone watched the stock pop. SpaceX opened at $150 a share and shot up more than 20% in its first hour of trading.
The quieter number is the one on its balance sheet, where SpaceX is now holding 18,712 bitcoin.
That pile of bitcoin is worth about $1.2 billion, which makes SpaceX the 8th-largest public holder of the coin. It earned that spot on the same day it started trading.
Picture a moving company that also keeps a vault of gold in the back room. The main job is rockets, and the side stash is crypto.
A public holder is just a company whose shares trade on the open market and that keeps bitcoin on its books. More firms have started doing this, treating it like a cash reserve they can hold for years.
The 18,712 count comes from SpaceX's own filing and a bitcoin tracking site. So this is reported, not a rumor.
Bitcoin runs on a shared digital record called the blockchain, and the coins sit in digital wallets. If you want to own some yourself, here is how to buy bitcoin the simple way.
Tesla does the same thing, with 11,509 bitcoin, and Musk runs both companies. Put the two together and his empire would rank 4th among all public holders.
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SpaceX cracked the top 10, but it is nowhere near the top spot.
That title goes to Michael Saylor's firm, Strategy. It holds 845,256 bitcoin, more than 40 times what SpaceX owns.
Strategy helped kick off this whole trend. It turned itself into a bitcoin piggy bank years ago, and now dozens of firms copy the playbook.
That gap shows how new SpaceX is to the game. It just started, while Strategy has been stacking coins for years.
Here is the rough part. Bitcoin is having a bad year.
The coin is down more than 27% since January. It started 2026 near $88,000 and now trades close to $64,000.
That means SpaceX is sitting on a bet that has already lost ground in 2026. The same stake was worth a lot more just a few months ago.
Musk does not seem fazed. He has backed crypto for years, and last year he called the U.S. dollar "hopeless."
The IPO did something else. It made Musk the world's first trillionaire, with a net worth Forbes now pegs near $1.1 trillion.
The deal was also the largest IPO ever, according to Forbes. Investors now have two ways to bet on Musk.
They can buy the stock. Or they can watch what his bitcoin pile does next.
The rocket launch grabbed the headlines. The bitcoin on the books may be the part investors remember.
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