Elon Musk, CEO of two big companies, is rich. Actually, recently he became a trillionaire. When written out, a trillion looks like this:
1,000,000,000,000
But his net worth reached $1.3 trillion after trading on Monday, according to the Forbes rich-person wealth-tracker site. The next person on Musk’s list, Google co-founder Larry Page, has $301.4 billion. In other words, Elon Musk not only has a trillion dollars, but almost a trillion dollars more than the next richest man.
This is calculated differently (or perhaps rounded up) by Bloomberg, which says Musk’s net worth is only $1.27 trillion. Unfortunately for Musk, assuming this is the correct calculation, Musk still wouldn’t be the world’s richest person if he lost $1 trillion of net worth – but in any case, he would still be the world’s richest person if he lost $900 billion.
To be clear, it’s not like he crossed the 13-figure net worth threshold because he did a good job as CEO that day and the profits came into SpaceX or Tesla, and that money went to him. It doesn’t work that way. The roughly 42% stake in SpaceX held by Musk increased in value as people eagerly bought the stock as it became publicly available, increasing the company’s overall valuation. This is how we measure the wealth of giants.
This also means that a particularly good or bad trading day for SpaceX or Tesla — in which Musk has a stake of about 12.8% — will continue to cause vertigo-inducing fluctuations in Musk’s net worth from day to day. A year ago, in 2022, they had suffered a loss of $100 billion, which was extraordinary at that time. But on Monday alone he got at least this much profit. If he lets you down, think about how much he could lose the next day. Or the next day.
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