Elon Musk is now the world’s first trillionaire after SpaceX’s public markets debut on Friday, according to Bloomberg News.
The SpaceX founder and CEO owned roughly $860 billion worth of the rocket company’s stock after it was priced at $135 per share just ahead of the IPO. Combined with his stake in Tesla, and the immediate pop of SpaceX’s stock on Friday after it began trading, that’s enough to give the tech magnate — already the richest person in the world — an on-paper wealth of more than $1,000,000,000,000.
SpaceX’s stock continued to climb on Friday in early trading, adding to Musk’s wealth.
Musk’s ascendance to trillionaire status comes at a time when he is more disliked and more powerful than ever.
Musk spent much of 2024 funding Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, to the tune of around $300 million. He then got involved in the Trump administration, leading the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” — which, by all accounts, did not cut overall government spending and mostly involved canceling a number of contracts with little review or care for their contents.
Musk also led the dismantling of whole departments like USAID, a decision that the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health says has already led to hundreds of thousands of deaths.
There is more wealth coming to Musk.
Last year, he was awarded a pay package by Tesla’s shareholders that could be worth $1 trillion on its own, provided he grows that company’s valuation and hits certain operational milestones. And while 1 billion of his SpaceX shares cannot be sold unless the company creates a human colony on Mars, Musk can borrow against those shares in the meantime. That means he could quickly access billions of dollars in cash before reaching that goal (which SpaceX itself says is “improbable”), and without paying taxes on that wealth.
And while SpaceX is now going to have public shareholders, Musk will enjoy immense power as the company pursues what it calls the largest addressable market in history. He owns more than 80% of the voting control, can hand-select the board of directors, and has structured the company in a way that severely limits any legal challenges.
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Sean O’Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane.
You can contact or verify outreach from Sean by emailing sean.okane@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at okane.01 on Signal.
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