There are thousands billionaires around the world. But there is only one trillionaire.
Elon Musk became the first person to amass a personal fortune of more than $1,000,000,000,000 – or 12 zeros – after shares of his rocket company SpaceX debuted on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange on Friday.
SpaceX’s initial public offering on Thursday valued the company at nearly $1.8 trillion, compared with its last private valuation of about $1.25 trillion. After the company’s shares hit $150 on Friday morning in Modern York and continued to rise, SpaceX’s market capitalization has reached about $2.2 trillion.
According to Musk’s significant holdings in SpaceX, his car company Tesla and several other ventures, his personal coffers have expanded enough to push him into trillion territory. Bloomberg AND Forbeswhich conduct extensive research to identify the richest people in the world. According to Bloomberg, his net worth exceeded $400 billion in 2024, which means that it has almost tripled in less than two years. (Significant disclaimer: Musk doesn’t have $1 trillion in his bank accounts. Most of his wealth is hidden in stocks, some of which he won’t be able to sell any time soon. he promised to donate ultimately half of his fortune.)
He remains a hated figure in many circles, including due to his efforts last year to dismantle parts of the U.S. government and his years of popularizing and allowing hateful rhetoric through their presence on social media. To protest the IPO, one activist group inflated a giant image of Musk in Modern York’s Times Square this week.
In addition to Musk, Forbes estimates the wealth of 3,350 people it considers ordinary billionaires, from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos at the top to music mogul Dr. Dre downstairs. Meanwhile, Bloomberg tracks the list of the 500 richest billionaires.
According to estimates, Musk is now more than three times richer than his closest competition, the founders of Google. The potential upcoming IPOs of generative AI labs OpenAI and Anthropic will cement at least a few additional billionaires, but won’t bring anyone closer to Musk’s orbit. Retail investors buying SpaceX stock now certainly won’t get wealthy instantly, and neither will people living near sullied xAI data centers.
As long as SpaceX continues to successfully transport people, goods and data between Earth and space, with little competition, Musk will remain in a class of his own.