DID MARKETWATCH MEAN TO MAKE HIM SEEM SO BAD-ASS? The ‘SpaceX mafia’ is here. Elon Musk’s big IPO could launch a constellation of new companies.

During the past two decades, SpaceX has hired thousands of staff and granted them boatloads of restricted stock units, incentive stock options and nonqualified stock options that have vested over time. With the IPO milestone reached, employees can soon sell their equity in the company and pocket the proceeds in cash.

Some former SpaceX employees have already gone on to create their own companies, such as reusable-rockets company Relativity Space and Base Power, which owns and operates home batteries.

SpaceX alumni have created at least 150 companies that have collectively raised $12.6 billion from investors and created more than 8,000 jobs, according to AlumniFounders, a website that tracks projects created by people who have worked at the company for at least a year. The website also helps connect SpaceX employees-turned-founders to discover investors with their own ties to SpaceX, including staff at more than a dozen venture-capital firms.

“There are a lot of companies out there that were founded by people who left SpaceX but took the engineering practices and know-how to get things done,” Garrett Reisman, a former astronaut and former director of space operations at SpaceX, told MarketWatch. “It’s kind of cool because you see this whole ecosystem of startups and space experts that are doing some amazing work and are leading to kind of a whole renaissance of very dynamic business activity.”

Musk might already be the most productive human being in history. What his alumni might do with all that capital… wow.