How do I git rebase the first commit?

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The easy way, with a recent-enough Git (this has been out for a long time now so you should have this):

git rebase -i --root

The other easy way, as twalberg noted in a comment that has since been deleted but is now expanded in https://stackoverflow.com/a/68279810/1256452’s answer, is to use git checkout --orphan to set up to make a new root commit, which you can copy the old commits on top of. (This is what rebase -i --root ends up doing internally anyway.) For some purposes, such as splitting what had been the initial commit, this initial blank commit is helpful.

Side note from the future (2022): It’s often a good idea to make the very first commit contain just a few boilerplate files like a README. The very first commit in any new, empty repository is always a bit special. Note that if you use hosting sites like Bitbucket, GitHub, and GitLab, they will often make such an initial commit for you when you create a repository there, so that you can clone the repository thus created and have a starting point.

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