Elon Musk Becomes The First Trillionaire Thanks To Spacex Ipo

Do not let Elon try and split the appetizers—he can cover the jalapeño poppers all by himself. The tech entrepreneur became the world’s first trillionaire yesterday after SpaceX’s first day of trading sent the company’s stock up as much as 30% from its listing price of $135 to over $176 per share. At a time of unprecedented wealth inequality, Musk’s net worth catapulted to $1.1 trillion, according to Forbes.

SpaceX closed up 19% yesterday with a valuation of $2.1 trillion, making it the sixth most valuable public company in the US (and bigger than Musk’s other company, Tesla). Musk, who owns nearly half of the available SpaceX shares, will likely watch his net worth rise and fall by tens of millions as the stock fluctuates. And because the majority of Musk’s wealth is tied up in his publicly held companies, his trillion dollars isn’t liquid.

How much money is $1 trillion?

You can’t even compare Musk’s wealth to other rich people. The founders of Google, Amazon, Oracle, and Meta combined have ~$1.3 trillion. Musk is now on par with the economies of entire countries: Only 21 countries have GDPs over $1 trillion.

If your household brings in $84,000 a year (the US median income for 2024), it would take you 12 million years to make a trillion dollars, according to NBC. For a physical representation: if you painstakingly laid out one trillion single dollar bills end to end, it would stretch the distance of 200 round trips to the moon. With $1 trillion dollars, you could give everyone in the world (~8.2 billion people) $122. Or you could buy…

• Every piece of property in Houston for $879 billion.
• 243 billion gallons of gas at $4.11 a gallon. For context, Americans only bought 137 billion gallons of gas last year.
• Every carmaker in the US (excluding Tesla), Europe, and Japan…and still have $100 billion leftover.

It wasn’t just Musk who got richer. His entire inner circle of early SpaceX investors made a killing, minting several new billionaires, while early employees who had amassed stock in the company scored millions.—MM

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