The Thursday debut of SolarCity on Nasdaq was quite stellar; with the shares of the solar panel installer, sales and leasing firm witnessing a 47 percent gain --- from its $8 IPO price to $11.79 at the end of the day.

Marking a successful IPO for SolarCity - which has its stock trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange with the `SCTY' ticker symbol -, the shares were virtually grabbed by the investors when the company made them available for trading on Thursday; with the result that the company's IPO raising was $92 million, and its market cap at the close of the day was $585 million.

One-third of the available 11.4 million shares were bought by investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson, DBL, and Elon Musk - the chairman, biggest share-holder and main backer of SolarCity, which was co-founded in 2006 by Musk's cousins Lyndon Rive and Peter Rive.

For Musk, who is also the founder of aerospace company SpaceX, SolarCity is the latest firm which has made its public debut. On June 28, 2010, Musk's electric car company, Tesla Motors, raised $226 million, when it sold 13.3 million shares at $17 apiece. At present, the Tesla shares trade for $35.05.

Noting that Musk transformed the loss-making electric-car manufacturer into an award-winning company, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel told Bloomberg Business in the recent past: "He (Musk)'s a throwback to when people were doing less incrementalist things. The companies he's started are executing against a vision measured not in years but in decades."