Elon Musk has officially entered uncharted financial territory, becoming the first person in history to reach a net worth of more than $1 trillion, following the blockbuster Nasdaq debut of SpaceX on Friday.
The aerospace giant priced its initial public offering at $135 a share, already the largest IPO of all time before shares began trading under the ticker SPCX.
Shares jumped as high as $168.75, pared some gains to around $158, then rebounded to a fresh high of $176.52, with the stock trading roughly 26% higher at around $170 by mid-afternoon. The offering itself raised a record $75 billion.
The surge pushed SpaceX’s market capitalization past the $2 trillion mark and, with it, catapulted Musk’s personal fortune past the trillion-dollar threshold.
Estimates of his exact net worth vary slightly by outlet and moment-to-moment share movements, but most pegged it at roughly $1.05 to $1.1 trillion on Friday.
CNBC put the figure at about $1.05 trillion, combining Musk’s SpaceX stake worth more than $766 billion with his Tesla holdings, worth about $280 billion.
Forbes’ estimate, based on a $150 share price, valued his SpaceX stock and options at $765 billion and his Tesla stake at $276 billion, alongside holdings in ventures like Neuralink and The Boring Company, for a total of roughly $1.1 trillion.
Musk owns roughly four out of every ten SpaceX shares following the IPO, and his voting control of the company now sits north of 82%, cementing his grip over the firm even as outside investors pile in.
Before the listing, Musk was already comfortably the world’s richest person. Forbes had pegged his pre-IPO fortune at about $780 billion, more than double the $291 billion net worth of the second-richest person on the planet, Google co-founder Larry Page.
SpaceX’s valuation now ranks it among the largest publicly traded companies in the United States, behind only the likes of Nvidia, Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon.
Musk is barred from selling any SpaceX shares for a year after the IPO under the terms of the listing, and any future sale would dilute his ownership stake and voting power a tension one academic described by noting that “on paper, you may be wealthy, but that’s an asset you’re not willing to sell.”
Looking ahead, Musk’s fortune could climb even further. A Tesla compensation package approved by shareholders last year could earn him more than $1 trillion over the coming years, potentially pushing his net worth toward the $2 trillion mark.
Musk’s rise has been staggering even by the standards of modern tech wealth.
He was first declared a billionaire in 2012, with Forbes estimating his net worth at $2.4 billion at the time; by 2019 it had reached $20 billion, before a Tesla stock split the following year helped make him the fifth person ever to cross the $100 billion threshold.
In the six years since, his fortune has grown roughly tenfold, a pace of wealth accumulation unmatched even by previous “world’s richest person” titleholders Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Bernard Arnault.
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
Elon Musk has become the world’s first trillionaire after SpaceX’s record-breaking Nasdaq debut sent its valuation past $2 trillion, pushing his combined SpaceX and Tesla holdings to roughly $1.05–$1.1 trillion.
This wealth is largely on paper. Musk can’t sell his SpaceX shares for a year, and doing so afterward would dilute the voting control he’s worked to preserve so the “trillionaire” milestone is a valuation marker, not liquid cash in hand.
