Elon Musk just became the world’s first trillionaire after SpaceX, his rocket and AI company, went public on Friday. It’s a staggering amount of wealth never seen before in the history of human commerce.
Musk, the world’s richest man even before SpaceX’s IPO, already owns about $279 billion in stock and options thanks to his role as Tesla’s CEO. After shares of SpaceX started trading, he added another $982 billion from owning nearly half the stock of SpaceX, which as of Friday was valued at $2 trillion. All told, that’s $1.26 trillion for Musk from just his two public companies, according to the Forbes.
However, Musk’s wealth is paper wealth, not a pile of cash in a bank somewhere. All of it is subject to how investors continue to value his companies, Tesla and SpaceX, going forward. One trillion dollars is one million million dollars. That would be impossible to spend in any reasonable manner in one lifetime. If one were to spend $1 million every hour every day, it would still take more than a century to spend $1 trillion. To help put it in context, here are six things that are worth less than Elon Musk.
Across the globe, only 20 countries have economies that are larger than $1.1 trillion, according to the International Monetary Fund. That means the vast majority of the world’s nations have an economy worth less than Musk. Among them are Taiwan ($977 billion), Ireland ($779 billion) Sweden ($760 billion) and Singapore ($660 billion), along with Musk’s native South Africa ($480 billion).
The island of Manhattan, home base for many of America’s financial and corporate powerhouses including Wall Street, had a gross domestic product of just over $1 trillion in 2024. (That’s the most recent year for which data is available from the Federal Reserve.)
"The second richest person has been hovering around $300 billion, so about less than one-third of what Musk can potentially be worth tomorrow," said Matt Durot, deputy editor at Forbes Wealth. "And only one other person, (Oracle founder) Larry Ellison, has ever been worth $400 billion.”
