In a social media post he owns, he recently lamented: “Whoever said money doesn’t buy happiness really knew what they were talking about.”
Now, the richest person in the world can test this maxim on another level, by winning a new title: the first trillionaire on the planet.
11% above the offer price, after starting to be traded in New York this Friday (12) valuing the rocket and artificial intelligence company founded by Musk at around US$2 trillion. As a result, his fortune reached a previously unimaginable figure of almost US$1.05 trillion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. It is more than three times the net worth of the second richest person in the world, Larry Page, co-founder of Google.
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It was less than 10 years ago that Bloomberg’s wealth index first recorded a fortune exceeding $100 billion — a mark that Musk left behind in 2020. Since then, he has come to dominate the rankings of the planet’s richest, first with Tesla Inc. becoming one of the best-performing stocks in history and, later, with investors rushing to take a stake in Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name of SpaceX, today among the most valuable companies in the world.
A fortune worth US$1 trillion — something close to Switzerland’s Gross Domestic Product — is almost impossible to measure. Steve Cohen, who earned $3.4 billion last year as the world’s highest-paid hedge fund manager, would need to repeat that result for nearly 300 years to reach $1 trillion. If Musk’s 14 children inherited equal shares of his wealth, each of them would rank 29th among the richest people in the world.
“We’re not talking about generational wealth,” said Dan Walter, an independent compensation consultant. “We are talking about something infinite.”
It is a milestone in the trajectory of Musk, 54, whose wealth has already made him one of the most powerful and divisive figures on the planet. And he didn’t hesitate to use his fortune to support his worldview: he bought Twitter in 2022 to combat what he called the “woke mind virus”, funded an AI chatbot aligned with his vision and helped propel Donald Trump to a second term in the White House through donations.
The more than US$291 million he spent on the 2024 federal election represents less than 0.03% of his current wealth — the equivalent of a US$291 donation to a millionaire.
Turbulent path
Still, Musk’s journey from billionaire to trillionaire has had its bumps.
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The purchase of Twitter in 2022 led him to sell more than US$15 billion in Tesla shares, helping to bring down the automaker’s shares in a transaction that quickly began to look too expensive. The $56 billion compensation package negotiated with Tesla in 2018 was overturned by a Delaware judge following a lawsuit filed by some investors. And his decision to join Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, in addition to his support for radical political movements, alienated millions of potential customers and reduced Tesla’s car sales.
Somehow, however, Musk got through it all without any major damage. Twitter, later renamed X, saw the value of its data soar with demand for artificial intelligence, and he ended up merging the platform with xAI, his AI startup. Tesla moved its headquarters from California to Texas and last year won an appeal that allowed Musk to keep his original compensation package while also granting him a new deal that could be worth up to $1 trillion if the company hits certain milestones. And Tesla investors put the drop in car sales on the backburner to bet on future offerings, such as robots and Optimus robots.
SpaceX decola
Although Musk’s rise to the rank of trillionaire is mainly due to SpaceX, a company based in Starbase, Texas, which he founded in 2002, it was Tesla that first boosted his climb up the ranking of the world’s richest. Shares of the Austin-based electric car maker — of which Musk remains the largest shareholder — have risen around 35,000% since its IPO in 2010.
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But SpaceX’s dominance in the orbital launch market, coupled with its Starlink satellite internet service, launched in 2019, has attracted increasing attention from investors. Valued at around $100 billion in a 2021 investment round, the figure jumped to $1 trillion in February after Musk merged it with xAI and the social network X. The combined business — which now holds the record for the largest IPO in history, raising $75 billion — accounts for more than 70% of Musk’s net worth.
Musk’s fortune remains largely on paper, with few assets outside of stakes in his own companies, according to the Bloomberg Wealth Index. If he decided to sell slices of any of these businesses, he could lower the value of the companies in the eyes of investors.
Still, Tesla and SpaceX have compensation plans for Musk, CEO of both companies, which could earn him new equity stakes if the companies meet a series of ambitious financial and operational goals. If all objectives are met, the combined value of the two packages would reach around US$1.8 trillion.
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