ELON Musk, on Friday, June 12, became the world’s first trillionaire after shares in his SpaceX Rocket Company soared during the biggest-ever stock market debut.
The Tesla and SpaceX Founder comfortably cemented his status as the world’s richest man, with his total net worth standing at $1.11trillion (£828billion), according to the Bloomberg rich list.
The BBC reported that this came as the rocket, telecommunications and artificial intelligence (AI) company was listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange with a value of $2.2trillion.
The company said its shares would be offered at $135 each, but trading opened at $150 and briefly reached $176.50 in a show of investor enthusiasm for potential business related to space and companies associated with Musk.
SpaceX shares closed on Friday at about $161.
The initial public offering (IPO) of SpaceX raised $75billion from investors and underwriters of the deal before shares of the company hit the open stock market on Friday.
Musk’s 42 per cent ownership stake in SpaceX gives him essentially unilateral control over everything it does. He can spend the money being invested however he likes.
According to Bloomberg, his shares in SpaceX were worth $767.1billion at close of trade, and he has another $53.8billion in SpaceX options. He also has $168billion in Tesla shares, and a further $116.4billion in Tesla options.
https://14f4c7459d8adb0ac76acfb9c43c586c.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-45/html/container.html Musk’s status as the world’s first trillionaire immediately sparked debate about wealth inequality, as his wealth is now similar to the entire economic output of Poland or Switzerland.
Such unheard of wealth has already turned Musk into a powerful and divisive figure in global politics.
He gave hundreds of millions of dollars to the re-election campaign of United States (US) President, Donald Trump, after criticising the country’s leadership, and for several months last year, Musk led the Department for Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Through drastic cuts to government spending, Musk was responsible for the closure of the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
Such cuts could cause more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, according to a warning published by researchers in the Lancet medical journal.
He has also criticised leadership in the United Kingdom (UK) and elsewhere, often on topics of immigration and promoting of racial divisions.
Musk has repeatedly clashed with UK Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, including over the murder of 18-year-old British student, Henry Nowak.
Democratic US senators, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren, were among a slew of politicians to condemn the trillionaire milestone. Warren said it should be a “wake up call” and argued it underlines the need for wealth taxes.
However, Musk is a trillionaire only on paper, as it is almost entirely tied to the value of his stockholdings in Tesla and now SpaceX. He is unable to sell any of his SpaceX stock for at least a year.
SpaceX’s public listing is also expected to have made millionaires of over 4,400 of its current and former staff through the shares in the company they had been given as part of their pay.
SpaceX’s valuation is largely based on optimism about its potential future earnings, as opposed to financial results it has demonstrated so far. It is currently not profitable, meaning it loses more money from its operations than it makes.
The company lost over $9billion in 2025 and 2026 so far, according to its financial filings, due to its huge spending on AI and other infrastructure investments, with the biggest focus of its business being the manufacture and launch of rockets with reusable parts.
SpaceX also manufactures and launches Starlink Internet satellites, and through this year’s acquisition of xAI, another company Musk-owned and operated, SpaceX entered into the AI business, too.
SpaceX has said it will use the money to “fuel its growth strategy” around rockets, satellites for its growing Starlink Internet service, and AI, including speculative plans to build data centres in orbit.
But the ambitions of SpaceX are currently lofty than satellites or mergers. As stated in its IPO prospectus, the mission of SpaceX is: “To build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true nature of the universe and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.”
SpaceX even said its future growth and success is based in large part on building what it refers to as the “lunar economy.”
Essentially, such an economy would entail getting people and cargo to the moon and Mars, something that would need to be a regular occurrence for a true economy to develop around it.
SpaceX admits it is unsure such a thing will ever succeed, saying in its prospectus: “Many of our initiatives… involve significant technical complexity, unproven technologies or technologies that do not exist, and such initiatives may not achieve commercial viability.” Protestors staged an anti-Musk demonstration in New York City’s Times Square ahead of SpaceX’s listing.
While many individual investors were eager to be a part of SpaceX’s listing and snap up stock, others had expressed concerns about the number of investors who will be exposed to the company perhaps unintentionally.
Pension pots and savings accounts often invest in index-linked funds, which buy into the biggest firms and will be affected by expected fluctuations in the company’s share price.
Where the price of SpaceX goes from here will be the biggest concern for such investors.
Musk’s Stratospheric Rise To Trillionaire Status
WITH a current estimated net worth of about $1.11trillion, according to Bloomberg, Musk sits well above wealthy billionaires topping rich lists, including Google Co-founders, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin; Amazon Founder, Jeff Bezos, and boss of French luxury goods group, LVMH, Bernard Arnault.
Musk, who first made waves in the tech industry in the late 1990s, hasn’t always topped the rich list though.
In January 2020, he was only the 35th richest person in the world, with a fortune of around $28billion. But his wealth took off that year as the value of his two biggest companies- electric carmaker, Tesla, and space exploration and AI firm, SpaceX, began to grow sharply. Musk holds large stakes in both businesses.
In the last six years, his wealth trajectory mimics a jagged mountain range, with dramatic surges and steep declines driven by swings in Tesla’s share price, the rising value of SpaceX and shifts in political and investor sentiment during his time in the Trump administration.
Each time, he has come back stronger. Now a trillionaire, Musk is almost four times richer than his nearest rival, Page, and more than five times richer than Meta boss, Mark Zuckerberg.
It’s important to remember that Musk’s wealth is mainly made up of stock holdings that can rise or fall, depending on investor sentiment. Indeed in February, the tech mogul said on X that less than “0.1 per cent” of his net worth was held in cash.
He currently owns a 12 per cent stake in Tesla, a company with a market valuation of around $1.5trillion, and a 42 per cent stake in SpaceX, which is now worth over $2trillion. Many of his shares have been pledged as collateral against personal loans.
The tech boss also owns stakes in smaller businesses, including The Boring Company, a tunnel construction firm; and Neuralink, which develops implantable brain-computer interfaces.
This extreme reliance on paper assets rather than liquid cash creates a striking imbalance. The horizontal block of his wealth is almost entirely consumed by two massive corporate holdings, leaving virtually no room for actual cash.
Back in 2015, only two of the world’s top 10 richest people were from the tech world. Now that number is seven, including the entire top six.
