Elon Musk has become the world’s first paper trillionaire after the blockbuster initial public offering of his rocket and artificial intelligence firm SpaceX.
The 54-year-old’s net worth stood at an estimated 982.6 billion US dollars before the float, according to Forbes, before surging past the one trillion dollar mark following the record-breaking IPO.
Musk holds a 38 per cent stake in SpaceX, worth 688 billion dollars at the initial IPO price, before shares climbed further on the first day of trading.
His total fortune also includes his holdings in electric carmaker Tesla, social media platform X, brain interface startup Neuralink, and tunnelling firm the Boring Company.
The milestone means Musk has financially eclipsed a group of the world’s most prominent tech billionaires combined, including Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Oracle chairman Larry Ellison, whose fortunes total 1.04 trillion dollars between them.
According to XTB’s Kathleen Brooks, it is Musk’s “cult-like status” that has resonated strongly with retail investors who participated in the SpaceX float.
The offering was notable for allocating an unusually high proportion of shares to retail investors, thought to be around 20 per cent to 25 per cent, alongside large institutional players.
SpaceX has set itself ambitious goals ranging from colonising Mars to deploying AI data centres in space, attracting investors eager to buy into that vision.
As founder, chairman and chief executive of SpaceX, Musk retains not only a sizeable class A shareholding but also more than 90 per cent of class B shares, which carry 10 votes per share held.
That structure gives Musk significant majority control over the firm’s voting power and makes it effectively impossible for him to be removed without his own consent.
The SpaceX listing comes amid renewed controversy in the UK, where Musk has used social media to highlight demands for people to take to the streets following a knife attack in Belfast this month.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer vowed to “crack down on anyone who is fuelling this division,” directing criticism at Musk and the broader role of social media in inciting unrest.
Musk’s path to this historic wealth milestone stretches back to the mid-1990s, when he co-founded an online business directory called Zip2 alongside his brother Kimbal.
The brothers sold Zip2 to computer maker Compaq for 307 million US dollars in 1999, netting Musk a personal windfall of 22 million dollars.
He reinvested those proceeds into an online banking startup called X.com, which merged with payments firm Confinity in 2000 to form the business that eventually became PayPal.
Despite being fired as chief executive of that company, Musk walked away with a 180 million dollar fortune when PayPal was later sold to eBay.
He founded SpaceX in 2002 and made a six million dollar investment in the then fledgling Tesla just a year later, laying the foundations for his extraordinary accumulated wealth.