How Elon Musk Became The World’s First Trillionaire

Tech billionaire Elon Musk’s net worth crosses $1 trillion threshold after rocket company’s landmark IPO.

Elon Musk has made history, becoming the first person in human civilisation to amass a net worth of one trillion dollars, a milestone once considered the stuff of science fiction.

The wealth barrier was crossed on Friday when SpaceX opened trading on the Nasdaq at $150 per share, giving Musk a stake in the rocket and satellite company worth more than $766 billion.

Combined with his Tesla shareholding, valued at approximately $280 billion, Musk’s total net worth from both companies stood at roughly $1.05 trillion.

The breakthrough was driven by the newly minted valuation of SpaceX the rocket, satellite internet and artificial intelligence company Musk controls and has left him worth more than the world’s next four richest people combined.

The achievement rewrites the record books on wealth accumulation.

As recently as the summer of 2024, Musk, Jeff Bezos and Bernard Arnault were swapping the title of world’s richest person on a near-daily basis, with net worths hovering around $200 billion.

Now, not even two years later, Musk has amassed a fortune worth twice as much as Bezos and Arnault put together.

The SpaceX IPO alone added more than $180 billion to Musk’s fortune. His personal net worth is now larger than the national GDP of Taiwan, Ireland or Sweden.

To put the scale of the achievement in perspective, a billion dollars is already hard to grasp enough to spend $27,000 a day over a 100-year lifetime.

A trillion is practically impossible to imagine, equivalent to roughly $27 million per day for an entire century.

Economic historians say the milestone may be without precedent in recorded human history.

Guido Alfani, a professor of economic history at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy, estimated that Musk could command the equivalent labour of 557,800 people in 2025, far surpassing John D. Rockefeller’s comparable figure of 116,000 in 1937 or Andrew Carnegie’s 48,000 in 1901.

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“Elon Musk might be the wealthiest person who has ever lived excluding emperors or other rulers whose wealth is not easily distinguishable from that of the state,” Alfani said.

The news has, however, reignited fierce debate over wealth inequality.

Musk’s coronation as the first person in history to be worth $1 trillion is expected to add fuel to the debate over wealth inequality and the rise in power of America’s richest tech founders.

Critics at Oxfam have been particularly vocal.

“A trillion dollars in the hands of one man is incompatible not only with an affordable economy, but also with a healthy democracy,” said Ahmed, senior director of Economic Justice at Oxfam America.

“Economic inequality begets political inequality, and ordinary people bear the brunt while billionaires continue to write the rules for their own benefit.”

As a trillionaire, Musk is now worth roughly 3 percent of the entire United States GDP.

Musk, 54, built his fortune primarily through his stakes in Tesla and SpaceX, which have both seen explosive growth over the past decade.

The SpaceX IPO, one of the most anticipated market events in recent memory, ultimately proved to be the final catalyst that propelled him into an entirely new league of wealth, one that, until now, no human being had ever entered.