Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire on Friday, after the record-breaking stock market debut of his company SpaceX. With a current estimated net worth of about $1.11tn, according to Bloomberg, the tech mogul now sits well above the wealthy billionaires topping rich lists – including Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and LVMH boss Bernard Arnault.
Musk, who first made waves in the tech industry in the late 1990s, hasn’t always topped the rich list. In January 2020, he was only the 35th richest person in the world, with a fortune of around $28bn. But his wealth took off that year as the value of his two biggest companies – electric carmaker Tesla and space exploration and AI firm SpaceX – began to grow sharply. Musk holds large stakes in both businesses.
“Elon Musk becomes world's first trillionaire after SpaceX's record-breaking stock market debut.”
His wealth trajectory over the last six years resembles a jagged mountain range, with dramatic surges and steep declines driven by swings in Tesla’s share price, the rising value of SpaceX, and shifts in political and investor sentiment during his time in the Trump administration. By January 2021, he had risen to become the world’s richest person, briefly overtaking Jeff Bezos. But his fortune dipped in 2022 amid a downturn in US tech stocks, and fell sharply again in early 2025 as investor concerns over his role in the Trump administration coincided with a slump in Tesla’s share price. Each time, he has come back stronger.
Now a trillionaire, Musk is almost four times richer than his nearest rival Larry Page, and more than five times richer than Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg. But what does a thousand billion dollars actually look like? A BBC chart breaks the unimaginable sum down dot by dot, comparing his total wealth to other high-profile figures, government spending budgets and luxury assets.
It’s important to remember that Musk’s wealth is mainly made up of stock holdings that can rise or fall depending on investor sentiment. Indeed in February, the tech mogul said on X that less than “0.1%” of his net worth was held in cash. Musk currently owns a 12% stake in Tesla, a company with a market valuation of around $1.5tn, and a 42% stake in SpaceX, which is now worth more than $2tn. Many of his shares have been pledged as collateral against personal loans. He also owns stakes in smaller businesses, including The Boring Company, a tunnel construction firm, and Neuralink, which develops implantable brain-computer interfaces. This extreme reliance on paper assets rather than liquid cash creates a striking imbalance – his fortune remains as volatile as the markets that created it.