With SpaceX’s NASDAQ debut, Tesla founder Elon Musk becomes the first person in history to surpass the trillion-dollar wealth threshold.
• SpaceX celebrates successful stock market debut on the NASDAQ
• IPO does Elon Musk the first trillionaire in history
• Sale to Compaq in 1999 laid the foundation for a unique success story
SpaceX’s stock market debut this Friday makes Elon Musk the first trillionaire in human history. The math behind it is simple: the company starts trading with a valuation of $1.77 trillion. Musk’s stake of around 42 percent catapults him over the threshold – his share package is worth around $740 billion. Even before the IPO, he topped the list of the richest people with around $696 billion. One thing is clear: This trillion is not a bank account, but rather investment assets. Its value depends on how the market values Tesla and SpaceX.
A number that defies imagination
A trillion dollars – a one with twelve zeros – is beyond belief. According to Oxfam, if you spent a million dollars every day, it would take 2,740 years to completely use it up. A trillion seconds is more than 31,000 years. It becomes more clear when compared to other assets: Musk is now more than three times richer than Google co-founder Larry Page, the current number two. Even the combined assets of the next four on the rich list – the Google founders Page and Sergey BrinOracle founder Larry Ellison and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos – cannot overtake Musk after the SpaceX IPO.
From internet founder to tech titan
It all started modestly. In 1995, Musk founded the software company Zip2 with his brother Kimbal, which provided online business directories for newspapers; According to their own story, in the early days the two showered at the YMCA and shared a single computer. In 1999, Compaq bought Zip2 for $307 million – Musk’s share earned him around $22 million. He put the money into X.com, one of the early online financial services that became PayPal after merging with competitor Confinity. When eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion in 2002, Musk received around $160 million – the seed capital for Tesla and SpaceX, both of which he built in the same decade. One episode shows how tight things were at times: in 2009, on the verge of insolvency, Daimler, of all companies, saved Tesla with a $50 million investment for just under ten percent. The Stuttgart-based company sold its share again in 2014 – with a hefty profit of around $780 million. Today it would be worth many times that amount, namely around $150 billion.
The rise in numbers: from 634th place to trillion
What is particularly remarkable is the pace. In 2012, two years after the Tesla IPO, Musk appeared on the Forbes billionaires list for the first time – with an estimated two billion dollars, good for number 634. At the beginning of 2021, he overtook Jeff Bezos and became the richest person in the world; In November of the same year, he became the first person ever to break the $300 billion mark. In October 2025 he became the first 500 billionaire, in December the first 600 billionaire. According to Forbes, Musk was worth less than $25 billion just six years ago. His fortune grew by more than $550 billion last year alone. Like so many others on the list, his wealth comes almost entirely from stock ownership, not from salary: At Tesla, Musk was contracted for a $1 annual salary for a long time – his wealth is tied to the success of his companies, not to compensation.
From the first millionaire to the first trillionaire
Historically, this moment is the temporary climax of a long run. John Jacob Astor, generally considered the first American multimillionaire, was worth between $20 and $30 million when he died in 1848 – roughly one percent of US GDP at the time. Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie earned around $380 million in 1919, around 0.5 percent of economic output. When he died in 1937, oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller was worth $1.4 billion, about 1.5 percent of US GDP. As a trillionaire, Musk makes around three percent – more than any of these industrial barons based on his share of the US economy. Economist Guido Alfani from Bocconi University puts it in a nutshell: If you exclude rulers whose wealth can hardly be separated from the national treasury, Musk is likely to be the richest person who has ever lived.
The person behind the assets
Like the tycoons before him, Musk is a public figure far beyond business. He supported Donald Trump’s 2024 election campaign and then temporarily headed his Agency for Reducing Government Spending (DOGE); He uses his platform X (formerly Twitter), which he acquired in 2022 for $44 billion, as a public stage. In 2012 he signed the of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett initiated the “Giving Pledge”, the commitment of the super-rich to make large donations. A majority of his donations go through the Musk Foundation. His entrepreneurial profile remains the defining one: Tesla, SpaceX and the AI company xAI bundle electromobility, space travel and artificial intelligence under one roof.
The foundation of the evaluation
There is one point about classifying the record number. SpaceX is still operationally in the red; the $1.77 trillion valuation carries an ambitious AI and space growth story. It is normal for such valuations to fluctuate: Tesla temporarily lost more than 60 percent of its market value in 2022 as a result of the surge in inflation and then rose sharply again. The fact that Elon Musk was the first person to exceed the trillion dollar wealth mark cannot be taken away from him – regardless of how the prices of his largest assets develop in the future. However, for investors who invest in them, their further development is of utmost importance. And this depends not least on whether the expectations placed on them are met.
Leon Müller, editorial team at finanzen.net
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