American Jane

A welder took a $28 an hour job in 2015 at a company he had never heard of. On Friday, Juan Hernandez became a millionaire. He spent ten years building the structures that lifted rockets onto the launch pad. SpaceX paid him partly in stock, the way it paid its cooks, machinists, technicians and cafeteria staff, equity instead of bigger salaries. His $10,000 grant grew into $880,000 at the IPO price. The first day pop carried it past a million. He is 42, an immigrant from Mexico, married, three kids. He says he is keeping the job. He is not the outlier. He is the pattern. 4,400 current and former SpaceX employees became millionaires on Friday. One in five people who ever badged into the company. About 400 of them are walking away with $100 million or more. One employee took every cash bonus in stock instead of money. He is sitting on 50,000 shares, worth more than $8 million at Friday's prices. And then there is the other side of the cafeteria. Some employees sold their shares years ago, certain the company would never go public because Musk said he hated public markets. A few traded their stock for restaurant gift cards. The New York Times says they are consumed by regret. Same grant, same building, same years. One group held the claim. The other ate it. None of the winners can touch the money yet. The first selling window opens after the August earnings report, and the rest unlocks in waves through December. Underneath all of it sits the only lesson the market ever teaches. The welder and the gift card came from the same place. The difference was never the work. It was the ownership. Salary pays for the month. Equity pays for the era. A cook in Brownsville just answered the question every buyer of SPCX is asking at $170: what is a claim on this company actually worth? The piece prices that exact question at $2.2 trillion.

Elon Musk just became the world’s first trillionaire. Let’s make sure he’s also the last.

BREAKING: Google is planning to release 32 million mosquitoes across Florida and California. The company has asked the EPA for permission to proceed, with the public given until June 5 to respond. The mosquitoes are infected with Wolbachia bacteria, which stops them from reproducing and slowly collapses the wild population from within. Google's previous Debug Project trial in California's Central Valley nearly eliminated mosquitoes from three test sites entirely. A separate trial in Singapore cut dengue cases by 70% within 12 months. Google has now released over 1 billion mosquitoes across four continents. This new proposal is the largest deployment in US history.

At trial, the Rio Grande Presbytery (PCA) found Rev. Zachary Garris NOT GUILTY of Charge 1 regarding his comments on slavery from June 2024. However, Garris was found GUILTY of Charge 2 for “unwholesome speech” per Ephesians 4:29, based on a 2023 interaction on X with Anthony Bradley. The Presbytery has indefinitely suspended him.