Elon Musk has become the first person in recorded history to accumulate a net worth of $1 trillion.
According to a Forbes report, the business magnate crossed the milestone on Friday after SpaceX shares opened trading on the Nasdaq at $150 per share, well above the $135 IPO price set just a day earlier.
SpaceX’s opening price implies a market capitalisation of nearly $2 trillion for the rocket and space exploration company, cementing its place among the most valuable businesses ever listed on a public exchange.
What Forbes is saying
Forbes estimates Musk’s fortune at $1.1 trillion as of Friday, up from $982 billion on Thursday when SpaceX priced its initial public offering, making him not just the world’s richest person by a vast margin but the first individual ever to reach the 12-figure threshold.
Other News
- This incredible milestone reshapes the upper boundary of individual wealth in a way that would have seemed implausible just a few years ago.
- The second richest person in the world is now Larry Page, co-founder of Alphabet, with an estimated net worth of $296 billion, less than a third of Musk’s current fortune.
- Jeff Bezos, who held the record as the first person to cross the $200 billion mark in 2020, now ranks fourth globally with an estimated $247 billion. Larry Ellison, currently fifth with $229 billion, is the only other person ever to have been worth $400 billion.
Bill Gates became the first person worth $100 billion in 1999, but the dotcom crash quickly erased that milestone. The $100 billion threshold was not crossed again until 2017, when Bezos became the second person ever to reach it. Elon Musk has now lapped that figure more than ten times over.
More insights
The bulk of Musk’s $1.1 trillion fortune is tied to SpaceX, where his holdings have grown significantly since the company priced its IPO on Thursday.
- He owns 4.8 billion SpaceX shares now worth $715 billion at the $150 trading price, plus 350 million stock options with an exercise price of $8.40 per share worth an additional $50 billion, giving him a 38% stake in the company valued at roughly $765 billion.
- Before the IPO priced on Thursday, Forbes had valued Musk’s SpaceX stake at around $500 billion, based on the $1.25 trillion valuation from SpaceX’s merger with xAI in February. That figure has since been eclipsed entirely.
- Beyond SpaceX, Musk holds just over 10% of Tesla, which carries a market cap of $1.5 trillion, putting that stake at roughly $163 billion, with options to acquire a further 8% worth an additional $113 billion.
- Smaller holdings in brain interface startup Neuralink and tunnelling firm Boring Company, along with proceeds from previous Tesla share sales, account for the remainder of his wealth.
Forbes’ current estimate of Musk’s net worth does not include performance-based restricted shares that could eventually lift his stakes in SpaceX and Tesla to 47% and 29% respectively, before taxes and the cost of unlocking those shares.
To earn that additional stock, Musk would need to hit a series of extraordinarily ambitious targets, including growing SpaceX’s market cap to $7.5 trillion and Tesla’s to $8.5 trillion, and establishing a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants.
What you should know
Earlier, Nairametricsreported that Elon Musk’s net worth had climbed to an estimated $982 billion on Thursday after SpaceX priced its highly anticipated initial public offering at $135 per share.
According to a Forbes report, the IPO valued the space exploration company at approximately $1.8 trillion, bringing Musk closer than ever to becoming the first person in history to amass a trillion-dollar fortune.
The offering boosted Musk’s wealth by an estimated $188 billion in a single day, Forbes calculations showed, narrowing the gap between the world’s richest person and the unprecedented $1 trillion milestone.
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