Family Discussion: Shooting for the Stars

The following article is designed to help parents dialogue about a current event with their children. It was written at a 7th grade reading level.

READ

SpaceX has officially launched onto Wall Street.

Last Friday, Elon Musk's rocket ship company SpaceX made its debut on the stock market. The stock market is like a giant online marketplace, except instead of buying groceries or clothes, everyday buyers are purchasing tiny pieces of companies (called shares).

When a company does this for the first time, it's called "going public" or an “initial public offering” (IPO). Think of it like a pizza. Before, SpaceX was a pizza owned by a few people. Now, anybody can buy a slice… and millions of people did (555.6 million shares sold, to be exact).

Companies usually decide to go public for the money. It’s a lot easier to sell a piece of your company to a million buyers for a small price than to ask one investor to write a check for hundreds of thousands. That money can be used to pay bills or fund future projects.

SpaceX’s fundraiser was out of this world. It sold shares for $135 each and raised $75 billion. That’s more money than most countries spend in a year…

By the end of its first day on the stock market, one share of SpaceX soared to be worth $161. The company’s total value skyrocketed to more than $2.1 trillion, making it the sixth-largest company in America and the biggest IPO in recorded history.

And speaking of making history, Elon Musk is officially the galaxy’s first trillionaire.

SpaceX said it plans to use the money to create the rocket for NASA’s 2028 moon landing. It also plans to build AI datacenters in space and a city on Mars.

REFLECT

What gospel lesson can be taught through this story?

Money is a powerful thing. There’s very little Elon Musk can't make happen because of his enormous wealth. And yet, no one can buy their way out of the curse, or death, or the uncertainty of every day as a human being: “time and chance happen to them all” (Ecclesiastes 9:11).

The good news of the gospel is that the ultimate assurance, security, and power come from joining Jesus's covenant family. At the cross of Jesus, we are all invited to come with what we do not have and buy what we do not deserve.

What response to this story do I want to model for my children?

As parents, our posture toward money speaks volumes about our faith. If we see our wealth and possessions primarily as what we have earned and own, we are bound to compare ourselves to those with more and enter a cycle of ingratitude and discontentment.

But if we see all that we have as given by God (Matthew 6:25-30) and owned by Him (Psalm 24:1), we are free to live in both gratitude and generosity. Showing your children the hard-won work of countercultural contentment (Philippians 4:11-12) and intentional generosity will chart a path away from money’s tangles and toward the Kingdom’s upside-down joys.

RESPOND

• Discuss: Imagine you just inherited a trillion dollars. What would you do with it? Now imagine you had to spend 99% of it on something other than yourself or you’d lose it all (don’t worry, you still get $10B). What would you be excited to do?

  Memorize: Matthew 6:24, “No one can serve two masters, since either he will hate one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money” (CSB).

  Pray for gratitude and contentment with Matthew 6:28-30 as your guide: "O provider for the birds, help me learn to rely on Your gifts. Take away my worry, and replace it with thankfulness. O designer of the wildflowers, fill me with Your joy and peace. Take away my feelings of selfishness, and replace them with a desire to be generous. Amen."

Credit: Decaf (The Pour Over for Families). "One Reallllyyy Big Pizza" June 18, 2026.