Elon Musk is no longer a trillionaire. The world’s first person to reach that milestone has now set a record for losing more money than anyone in the history of finance, after his net worth crashed from a peak of $1.32 trillion in mid-June to $957bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index. The loss of about $363bn in less than two weeks is roughly equal to the annual GDP of Nigeria, a country of 242 million people.
The dramatic fall followed an equally dramatic rise. Musk became a trillionaire earlier this month after SpaceX, his artificial intelligence and space exploration company, went public in the largest initial public offering in history, raising $86bn from investors in one day. The IPO valued the company at over $2 trillion and catapulted Musk’s net worth to an estimated $1.11 trillion, according to Forbes – though it later surged to $1.32 trillion. At the time, his wealth was five million times the average American family’s salary.
“Elon Musk's net worth has plummeted from $1.32 trillion to $957 billion, losing $363 billion in less than two weeks.”
But SpaceX’s stock has since plummeted. Shares closed around $156 on Tuesday, down more than 30% from an intraday peak of $225 on June 16, according to Business Insider. The decline wiped out Musk’s trillionaire status, but he remains the world’s richest man with a still-eye-watering $957bn. His wealth is heavily tied to stock holdings in SpaceX and Tesla, where he is the largest individual shareholder and CEO. Tesla is considered one of the most volatile large-cap stocks, meaning whenever the market moves, so does his fortune.
Musk’s wealth has historically been characterised by dramatic surges followed by sharp declines. The really stratospheric changes began after the US presidential election in November 2024, when Tesla’s share price rose almost 90% to its peak in December 2024, adding more than $200bn to his personal wealth. He had spent less than $300m on the Trump campaign, effectively earning $750 for every dollar invested. But the SpaceX IPO eclipsed that, only to be undone by the subsequent slide.
The sheer scale of Musk’s wealth – and his losses – is hard to grasp. For context, $1 trillion could fund America’s national defence budget for a year, or cover the GDP of Switzerland or Poland. The UN estimates that $93bn per year is needed to end world hunger by 2030; a third of Musk’s former trillion would cover the total $372bn. In the UK, charity Crisis says $1.9bn would eradicate homelessness; in the US, $20bn. Yet Musk’s $363bn loss in under two weeks is greater than the total fortune of the world’s next richest person, Google co-founder Larry Page. No one person has ever amassed – and lost – such sums in financial markets.