TRACY, Calif. (AP) — Firefighters responding to a blaze that destroyed a massive medical equipment warehouse in Northern California and sent embers flying for miles were hindered by sprinklers and hydrants that weren't working, authorities said Friday.
The 1 million-square-foot (93,000-square-meter) warehouse in Tracy, a city about 55 miles (88.5 kilometers) east of San Francisco, supplied medical equipment to area hospitals. It's owned by Medline, a major medical-surgical products provider of equipment such as latex gloves, masks, surgical instruments and other medical supplies.
Thick black smoke billowed Friday from the site, as firefighters continued to put out hot spots.
Authorities said they don’t yet know why the water system failed during the blaze but it appeared to be a problem with the facility’s system, not city supply. The blaze broke out around 1 p.m. Thursday. Crews found the building's sprinkler system wasn't working and hydrants on the property lacked water pressure, Tracy Deputy Fire Chief Brian Bagley said. A fire official found little or no water was flowing through either system, he said.
Firefighters were forced to try to connect to city hydrants instead. The building was engulfed by fire within 40 minutes, Bagley said.
“We did a defensive approach at that point,” he said.
The facility had been evacuated, and no one was injured. The massive warehouse was one of more than 50 distribution centers across the country for Medline, which according to its online catalog sells bandages, wheelchairs, catheters, hospital beds and many other medical supplies.
It is not clear what exactly was stored at the Tracy facility but the company said in a statement that the warehouse was mainly serving Northern California hospitals and that following the fire it activated a contingency plan.
“Product distribution previously supported by the Tracy facility has been reassigned and it is in the process of being deployed to other facilities within our regional network to help maintain service and support customer needs,” Medline said.
Embers from the blaze sparked two grass fires, and set pallets and multiple big rig trailers at a nearby FedEx facility ablaze. Firefighters were able to knock those fires down.
Crews overnight had to contend with new fires in trailers that were loaded with supplies.
Bagley said the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives would help investigate the cause of the blaze, but authorities would probably not be able to get into the warehouse for at least a couple of more days. The sprinkler system had been tested in January by an outside company and no issues were found, Bagley said.
The warehouse is in a massive industrial park that also houses fulfillment and distribution centers for Amazon, Home Depot and FedEx.
No homes were evacuated. Bagley recommended people near the fire stay indoors but said air quality tests had not raised any “grave concerns.”
Smoke from a medical supply warehouse fire in Tracy, Calif., is seen from Livermore on Thursday, June 11, 2026. (Santiago Mejia/San Francisco Chronicle via AP)
This image from aerial video shows black smoke pouring into the sky from a fire at a medical equipment warehouse in Tracy, Calif., Thursday, June 11, 2026. (KGO via AP)
NEW YORK (AP) — Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire after shares of his rocket company SpaceX soared in Wall Street's biggest initial public offering of stock.
Shares in SpaceX jumped 24% after opening for trading at noon Friday, a sign that investors are looking past the billions the company is losing and instead betting that its massive investments in satellites, orbital data centers and artificial intelligence will pay off in the future.
SpaceX opened at $150 a share, then jumped to around $168 around 2:.20 p.m. ET. That price gave the company a market value of $2.2 trillion. Musk, who also is a major shareholder and the CEO of Tesla, is now worth an estimated $1.2 trillion, according to Forbes.
Musk says SpaceX, founded in 2002, is going public now because it needs money to fund its ambitions of putting satellites and data centers in space and eventually establishing a colony of people on Mars.
He marked the opening of trading on Nasdaq by joining a ceremonial bell ringing from Starbase, the South Texas home of SpaceX.
He reiterated his lofty goals “to make life multiplanetary.”
“Not just a few astronauts, I mean literally you,” Musk said. “Whoever you are watching this, SpaceX wants to be able to take you to the moon, take you to Mars and ultimately beyond.”
Known for his technological breakthroughs, as well as wild claims and missed deadlines, Musk was able to whip up enthusiasm for the IPO despite SpaceX losing billions of dollars a year.
Institutional and retail investors alike jumped at the opportunity to buy a piece of the company at $135 per share before trading began. The $75 billion in proceeds SpaceX raised easily topped the previous record IPO from oil giant Saudi Aramco in 2019.
The company trades under the symbol “SPCX.”
In addition to establishing a one-million person Martian colony, the company has promised to save humanity by establishing other outposts in space, launch data centers the size of football fields into orbit and outdo rivals Anthropic and OpenAI in the race to make money from artificial intelligence.
To reach its goals, SpaceX needs billions more than it currently takes in from its rocket and satellite business. Between the start of 2025 and March 31, 2026, the company, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., lost $8.7 billion.
Wall Street bankers that helped take SpaceX public are enthusiastic about the company — and the big fees they will earn — but not everyone thinks the stock price is justified.
Analysts at research firm Morningstar, which doesn't earn any investment banking fees, wrote that the IPO is “significantly overvalued" because of SpaceX's unproven technology and massive capital needs.
They estimate the company is only worth $780 billion — less than half its IPO value.
SpaceX itself has hinted at the challenges, conceding in regulatory documents that some of its business plans rest on “unproven technologies.” It also indicated that another part of the company, its artificial intelligence business called xAI, has no clear path to profitability and is burning cash to catch up with rivals.
On a livestreamed conference Thursday with the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, one of the investment banks making big money off the IPO, Musk offered few details.
He entertained the crowd with talk of “moon hotels,” a future Martian colony and a network of Earth-orbiting data centers powered by the sun. But when asked about plans for his flagship chatbot offering Grok, he pivoted to talking about his satellites.
Still, Musk has pulled off the seemingly impossible before.
The now-trillionaire — on paper at least — made his initial fortune by creating two companies, Zip2 and PayPal, that netted him about $200 million at sale. He used that money to start SpaceX and invest in Tesla, and defied the odds by creating a space company that figured out how to reuse rockets and a car company that made electric vehicles cool.
Musk has realized vast sums of wealth for himself, much of it in stock he has yet to cash in or grants for shares he’ll only receive if Tesla or SpaceX hit ambitious performance targets.
His recent pay package from Tesla was so large it even drew criticism from the Vatican. At Tesla, he’s worried shareholders by fighting with regulators or dividing his attention between multiple companies and last year by taking a role in the Trump administration.
But a rising stock price has cured all ills: Since it went public in 2010, Tesla has returned 20,000% for shareholders, or more than $1.2 trillion in investor wealth.
SpaceX is the first of three “megacap” companies expected to go public this year, with Anthropic and OpenAI to follow. Nasdaq even revised its rules to allow SpaceX to gain entry into funds tied to its indexes in 15 days, which means investors will end up buying the rocket maker's shares much earlier.
Not all investors are thrilled about SpaceX potentially showing up in their holdings of index funds.
Officials from pension funds for firefighters, teachers and other workers in California and New York sent a letter to SpaceX last month decrying some of the provisions in its IPO, including mandatory arbitration of shareholder claims and how much power Musk will hold over the company.
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AP reporters Stan Choe and Wyatte Grantham-Philips contributed from New York and reporter Matt O'Brien contributed from Providence.
Gwynne Shotwell, President and COO of SpaceX, third from right, celebrates with colleagues during a bell ringing ceremony for the IPO of SpaceX at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, Friday, June 12, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II)
A large inflatable figure depicting Elon Musk stands in Times Square in New York on Thursday, June 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
Gwynne Shotwell, President and COO of SpaceX speaks during a bell ringing ceremony for the IPO of SpaceX at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, Friday, June 12, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II)
Gwynne Shotwell, President and COO of SpaceX celebrates with colleagues during a bell ringing ceremony for the IPO of SpaceX at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, Friday, June 12, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II)
FILE - Elon Musk departs after a welcome ceremony with President Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People, Thursday, May 14, 2026, in Beijing. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File)
