They say that the first million is the toughest — turns out it’s also true for the first trillion.
SpaceX closed its first trading day on the Nasdaq last Friday at $160 a share, up roughly 19% from its $135 IPO price. That alone was enough to push Elon Musk past $1 trillion in net worth and make him the world’s first trillionaire. Most people would have called that a good week. Musk apparently disagreed, because on Monday the stock did it again, gaining another 20% to close at $192 a share, taking SpaceX’s market cap to $2.52 trillion.
Run the math on that single session and the numbers stop sounding real. SpaceX added close to $420 billion in market value between Friday’s close and Monday’s, and Musk owns somewhere between 42% and 43% of the company. That puts his gain from the SpaceX stake alone, in one trading day, at roughly $180 billion. Factor in his Tesla holdings and the rest of his portfolio, and his total net worth went from about $1.05 trillion on Friday to roughly $1.3 trillion by Monday’s close — a quarter-trillion-dollar swing in 24 hours.
Warren Buffett’s entire net worth, as of January 2026, is $148.9 billion. He built that fortune over a career that started when he bought his first stock at age 11 in 1941, turned professional in 1951, took control of Berkshire Hathaway in 1965, and ended only at the close of 2025, when he stepped down as CEO after 60 years running the company. Buffett has also given away more than $60 billion to charity since 2006, so the total wealth he’s created across eight decades of investing comfortably clears $200 billion. Musk matched that, and then some, in less time than it takes to watch a baseball game stretch into extra innings.
The SpaceX listing itself was always going to be a spectacle. It raised $75 billion, making it the largest IPO in history, ahead of Saudi Aramco’s $29 billion offering in 2019, and it minted an estimated 4,400 millionaires among current and former SpaceX employees along the way. What nobody quite priced in was a second-day pop on top of the first-day pop, the kind of move that usually happens to a meme stock, not to a $2 trillion aerospace and AI company. SpaceX is just one piece of the empire Musk has built across rockets, cars, and AI, but right now it’s the piece doing all the heavy lifting.
Buffett spent six decades compounding his way to $149 billion, one annual letter and one boring, profitable acquisition at a time. Musk made more than that on a Monday.