‘She’s Broke Now. She Just Doesn’t Know It’: Grant Cardone Says a SpaceX Employee Who Just Became a Millionaire and Sold Stock Is Making a Mistake

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.

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Six hundred thousand dollars spread over 30 years is $20,000 a year, which is below the federal poverty guideline for a two-person household, set at $21,150 for 2025 by the Department of Health and Human Services. That is the number that makes "she's broke" land. Everything feeding it, though, rests on Cardone's assumptions: the $400,000 tax bill, the 30-year horizon with no other income, and a lump sum left sitting in cash. The top federal rate of 37% plus a state levy could approach his figure for a high earner in a high-tax state, but an employee holding shares long enough for capital gains treatment would owe considerably less. His aside that she "can't" sell yet refers to the lock-up restrictions that typically bar insider sales for months after a listing.

The verdict serves a rule Cardone has repeated for years: "I only live extravagantly from free cash flow. The only time I spend money is when it's passive income. I never spend any of my earned income, ever," he said. "And I believe this, this is financial advice right here. Okay? Like if a person only spent their passive income, only passive, they would never ever be broke." It is the same thinking behind his long-running advice to the middle class to stop saving and start buying assets that pay, which isn't new.