Elon Musk Becomes the
World’s First Trillionaire
With SpaceX shares soaring 20 percent on
their first day of trading, the world’s richest person crossed another
milestone — one with 13 digits.
·
Elon
Musk became the world’s
first trillionaire on 12 June 2026.
·
His
net worth reached approximately $1.2
trillion after
the successful stock market debut of SpaceX.
·
SpaceX
shares opened at $150, above the IPO price of $135, and closed at $161.11, a gain of about 20%.
·
Nearly
50%
ownership stake in SpaceX.
·
Significant
holdings in Tesla.
·
Stakes
in Neuralink, The
Boring Company, and
other ventures.
·
SpaceX's
market valuation reached approximately $1.77
trillion after
its IPO.
·
Musk
became the world's richest person in January
2021,
surpassing Jeff
Bezos.
·
His
fortune has grown more than fivefold
in five and a half years.
·
Since
October 2025 alone, his net worth has roughly doubled.
·
Experts
noted that Musk's wealth now exceeds 3%
of U.S. GDP, a
larger share than the peak fortune of John
D. Rockefeller
relative to the economy.
·
The
median American household's net worth is about $200,000, making Musk's wealth roughly five million times larger.
·
Critics
argue that such concentration of wealth increases economic and political
inequality.
·
Supporters,
including Peter
Diamandis,
credit Musk with driving innovation in electric vehicles, space exploration,
artificial intelligence, and robotics.
·
They
argue that his companies create technologies that benefit society and inspire
entrepreneurship.
·
Bernie
Sanders
called Musk's trillionaire status a "moral travesty" and an example
of growing oligarchy.
·
Critics
argue that extreme wealth can translate into outsized political and social
influence.
·
Musk
has stated that advances in AI, robotics, and space technology could create an
era of "universal
high income" and
abundance.
·
He has
repeatedly emphasized that one of his long-term goals is making humanity a multiplanetary species through the colonization of Mars.
Elon Musk's rise to trillionaire status marks a historic milestone in global
wealth creation, while also intensifying debates about innovation, economic
inequality, and the growing influence of ultra-wealthy individuals in society
and politics.
[ABS News Service/13.06.2026]
Elon
Musk became the world’s first trillionaire on Friday (12.06.2026).
The
tech mogul reached that milestone when shares of his rocket company SpaceX
began trading on the stock market, opening at $150, signaling
a new era of ultra-affluence and widening wealth inequality.
SpaceX
shares ended up rising 20 percent from their initial public offering price of
$135, closing the day at $161.11. Mr. Musk’s net worth — which comprises his
stock in SpaceX and his electric carmaker, Tesla, as well as ownership stakes
in other ventures including the brain implant company Neuralink and the tunneling firm the Boring Company — stood at around $1.2
trillion.
Mr.
Musk, 54, was already the world’s richest person. He claimed that title from
the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in January 2021, after Tesla’s shares surged to
take his net worth past $185 billion.
Since
then, the South African-born entrepreneur’s fortune has more than quintupled in
a five-and-a-half year period, during which he bought the social media company
Twitter, founded an A.I. start-up, fused them with SpaceX and then took the
conglomerate public. In that time, Mr. Musk also spent more than $250 million
to help elect Donald J. Trump and advised the president.
And
Mr. Musk’s wealth-making has only accelerated, cementing his influence over
society, culture and global politics. Since October, his net worth has doubled.
“The
fact is that wealth for some and wealth inequality is growing in dimensions
that we’ve never seen before,” said Steven Durlauf, the director of the Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility at
the University of Chicago.
When
the oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller’s fortune was at its height in 1937, his
$1.4 billion net worth amounted to about 1.5 percent of U.S. gross domestic
product, Mr. Durlauf said. Mr. Musk’s net worth is
now equivalent to more than 3 percent of U.S. gross domestic product.
Such
wealth is so extraordinary that it can be hard to make meaningful comparisons.
The median American household had a net worth of just under $200,000 in 2022,
the year with the most recent data available from the Federal Reserve. That
means Mr. Musk’s net worth is five million times as large as that of the
typical family’s.
His
wealth dwarfs even that of the everyday wealthy. The top 10 percent of
households by income had an average net worth of $6.5 million in 2022, less
than .001 percent of the SpaceX leader’s total. The world’s second richest
person, the Google co-founder Larry Page, is worth around $304 billion,
according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Inequality
is notoriously difficult to measure, but the explosion of wealth at the top is
hard to dispute. The net worth of the middle 40 percent of households, adjusted
for inflation, has risen slightly more than 50 percent over the past decade,
according to data from the French economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman.
The top 1 percent have seen similar gains. But the richest .001 percent have
seen their wealth roughly double over the same period.
Beyond
Mr. Musk, the ultrawealthy have also experienced significant increases in their
fortunes. In 2016, a net worth of $100 billion — a mark that Mr. Musk crossed
about six years ago — would have easily placed someone at the top of the Forbes
Billionaires list. Today, $100 billion would rank them as the 20th richest
person in the world.
“Christ,
when I was a kid, we only talked about millionaires,” said Bernie Sanders, 84,
the progressive senator from Vermont. “If this isn’t an example of oligarchy, I
don’t know what is.”
Mr.
Musk’s rapid accumulation of wealth largely comes down to the appreciation of
his nearly 50 percent stake in SpaceX, which is worth more than $1 trillion.
During its I.P.O., the company sold more than 555 million shares, which valued
it at $1.77 trillion, up from a $400 billion valuation on the private market
last summer. Starting in January, SpaceX also granted Mr. Musk pay packages totaling 1.3 billion shares, which he cannot sell until he
hits certain operational milestones.
Mr.
Musk did not respond to a request for comment. But he has previously
acknowledged the trillionaire milestone.
In
February, he replied to a post on X about possible trillionaire status by
noting that he had created significant wealth for shareholders and held less
than 0.1 percent of his net worth in cash. In May, he responded on X to the
financial musings of Peter Diamandis, a friend and SpaceX investor, saying he
would reach “$10T or bust.”
Mr.
Musk has also recently said that “money won’t matter” in the future because
Tesla and SpaceX would develop robotics, A.I. and rockets so powerful that no
human would ever have to work again. In his utopian world of “amazing
abundance,” everyone would have “universal high income,” he has said.
Mr.
Musk’s allies said his net worth was justified by his impact, providing an
example and incentive for those who want to build successful companies. Mr.
Diamandis, the head of the XPrize Foundation, an organization that holds
contests to encourage scientific breakthroughs, said Tesla and SpaceX were
“raising the floor.”
“The
fruits of his labor are making him into a
trillionaire, and they’re uplifting humanity,” Mr. Diamandis said.
Adeo
Ressi, Mr. Musk’s college roommate at the University
of Pennsylvania, said the SpaceX chief never cared as much about financial gain
as obtaining resources to help him achieve his entrepreneurial goals. For Mr.
Musk, “money is a means to an end,” Mr. Ressi said,
comparing his friend’s mind-set to a gamer accumulating coins in a video game
to beat a level.
“He’s
amassing resources to do things, and the thing he wants to do most is colonize
Mars,” Mr. Ressi said. “That’s a really big driving
force behind his wealth accumulation.”
He
added that Mr. Musk was “not a poster child of wealth inequality” and pointed
to the tech leader’s lifestyle, in which he is known to work around the clock
and avoid the typical trappings of the rich, like islands and megayachts.
“It’s
not like he’s planning to leave this in a massive family trust,” Mr. Ressi said. “It’s literally going to be used to make
humanity into a multiplanetary species.”
But
critics say the way Mr. Musk chooses to lead his life is beside the point. His
net worth has already provided him with the means to personally acquire
companies and spend hundreds of millions of dollars to help elect a preferred
presidential candidate, Mr. Durlauf of the University
of Chicago said.
Becoming
a trillionaire will only magnify how “economic inequalities are spilling over
into the political domain,” he added.
Mr.
Sanders called Mr. Musk’s trillionaire status “a moral travesty,” noting that
60 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.
The
senator also agreed with the assessment that Mr. Musk was probably not as
interested in owning islands or yachts. The trillionaire, in his view, was
interested in just one thing.
“This
guy is into power,” Mr. Sanders said. “And he is now the most powerful person
on Earth.”