Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX made him a trillionaire—the first on the planet. The historic IPO of the company earlier this month, which aims to make humanity a spacefaring civilization, saw the richest man on the planet’s net worth hit $1.1 trillion.
Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) is already among the world’s most valuable companies, briefly surpassing Amazon in the days following its market float when it soared to a valuation of $2.78 trillion.
Musk owns approximately 5 billion shares in the company, meaning that a vast portion of his net worth is tied to the exploratory business. Despite SpaceX gaining some 20% in its first day of trading, a reality check soon sent its stock price downward. The stock lost 16.43% yesterday, a selloff of approximately $400 billion. Its market cap currently sits at $2.03 trillion.
A further dampener on Musk’s fortune is the value of shares for EV maker Tesla. Over the past month, Tesla shares have been down 6.6%, and by more than 7% for the year to date.
In turn, Musk’s net worth has dropped from a peak of $1.32 trillion to $1.08 trillion at the time of writing, per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The drop—between June 16 and a week later—is some $240 billion.
The eye-watering figure is roughly the market cap of (if not a little more than) global technology company IBM, according to data from Trading Economics. In 2024, IBM reported it employed approximately 270,000 people.
While the impact on Musk’s portfolio is fantastical, the fact remains that the entrepreneur is still the wealthiest individual on the planet and is still the only trillionaire on earth.
There’s also plenty of room for Musk to grow his wealth even further: When SpaceX published its S-1 on May 20, it revealed that on top of his current SpaceX holdings, Musk will be awarded an additional 1 billion restricted shares of class B common stock if he hits 15 market capitalization milestones up to a value of $7.5 trillion and establishes a “permanent human colony on Mars with at least 1 million inhabitants.”
Even the most bullish average investors will be watching for fluctuations in their portfolios. Some managers have avoided SpaceX, such as Danish pension fund AkademikerPension. Ahead of Musk’s company going public, the $25 billion group said SpaceX was “grossly overvalued” and had a “catastrophic governance structure,” Bloomberg reported.
Other managers have highlighted SpaceX as a “once-in-a-generation” event, with an unprecedented impact in both scale and market impact. U.S. Bank’s Kaush Amin, managing director and head of private market investing, was clear on the risks (“elevated valuation, governance, and volatility”) but also its potential: “The IPO prices in long-term dominance across telecom, AI infrastructure, defense, and aerospace.”
The next trillionaire?
Of course, once someone joins the billionaire club, or the hundred-billion club, or the trillionaire club, the question that follows is: “Who’s next?”
Prediction market bettors on Kalshi are already making their thoughts known on that subject. At the time of writing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is leading the polls to be the next trillionaire with odds of 50%.
At present, Huang has a net worth of $173 billion, up $18 billion this year. Huang’s fortune is derived from the share price of the chipmaker he founded and now leads, which is up 10.5% for the year to date.
Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is also an option, according to Kalshi. Zuckerberg has odds of 23% at the time of writing, and a net worth of $201 billion. His fortune is down $32 billion, per Bloomberg calculations, in 2026 so far. Social media giant Meta has seen its share price sink by 13% for the year to date.
