Elon Musk Becomes the World’s First Confirmed Trillionaire Following SpaceX’s Historic IPO

While thousands of people across the globe hold billionaire status, there has only ever been one person to reach the trillion-dollar wealth milestone: Elon Musk.

Musk made history this week when he became the first person to amass a personal fortune topping $1 trillion — a staggering sum with 12 zeros — after shares of his aerospace company SpaceX began public trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange Friday.

SpaceX’s initial public offering priced on Thursday, valuing the company at nearly $1.8 trillion, a major jump up from its most recent private market valuation of around $1.25 trillion. When trading opened Friday morning in New York, shares launched at $150 and continued to surge through the day, pushing SpaceX’s total market capitalization to roughly $2.2 trillion.

According to both Bloomberg and Forbes, the two outlets that conduct ongoing rigorous research to rank the world’s wealthiest individuals, Musk’s large ownership stakes in SpaceX, electric automaker Tesla, and his other business ventures have grown enough to push him across the trillionaire threshold. Per Bloomberg’s data, Musk’s net worth already surpassed $400 billion in 2024, meaning his total fortune has nearly tripled in less than two years. An important context note: Musk does not have $1 trillion in liquid cash sitting in his bank accounts. The vast majority of his wealth is tied up in company stock, some of which he is restricted from selling in the near term. He has also pledged to donate half of his total wealth over his lifetime.

Musk remains a deeply reviled, polarizing figure in many communities. Critics have called out his efforts last year to undermine parts of the U.S. federal government, as well as his years of popularizing and allowing hateful rhetoric across his social media platforms. To protest the SpaceX IPO, one activist group inflated a giant effigy of Musk in New York’s Times Square earlier this week.

Outside of Musk’s unprecedented milestone, Forbes currently tracks 3,350 people who still qualify as “mere billionaires,” ranging from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos near the top of the global wealth ranking to music industry mogul Dr. Dre at the bottom of the outlet’s list. Bloomberg, by comparison, only publishes rankings for the 500 richest billionaires worldwide.

Per current wealth estimates, Musk is now more than three times richer than his closest competitors, Google’s co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. While the expected upcoming IPOs of generative AI leaders OpenAI and Anthropic will almost certainly create several new billionaires, industry analysts do not expect any of these new fortunes to come anywhere close to Musk’s. Ordinary retail investors buying SpaceX stock today also will not get rich overnight, and the communities living near Musk’s xAI AI data centers see none of the wealth generated by the company’s operations.

Barring major market shifts or a downturn in SpaceX’s performance, as long as the company continues to successfully ferry people, goods, and data between Earth and space while facing almost no competition in its core market, Musk will remain in a league of his own when it comes to global wealth.