The Rise of the World’s First Trillionaire

0:09When SpaceX went public on Friday, it kicked off the first day of trading for what might have been the most highly anticipated initial public offering in history. It was certainly the most expensive one. SpaceX shares opened at a record$150 a piece. In Texas, CEO Elon Musk stood in front of a video of rockets launching and addressed investors. And let me tell you, if people had told me this was going to happen, I was like, man, you must be smoking some really good crack. But the IPO itself wasn't the only history made last week. SpaceX going public also made Musk the world's first trillionaire.

0:53His stake in SpaceX now worth$820 billion. You add in that Tesla stake worth about$280 billion. And his total net worth as we have it right now is over$1.1 trillion. It's remarkable. It's clearly a watershed moment. Our colleague Teo Francis covers executive pay.

1:20Why is this an important moment? It's pretty striking. You know, I do our annual ranking of executive pay of CEO pay. And every year, there's a few CEOs who make$100 million or more. $100 million. Like, that's a lot of money. And yet, I have to remember to use an M and say million instead of B for billion when you're talking about the wealth of people like Zuckerberg and Bezos and Allison and, of course, Musk when we're going to have to start using the T. It's a really remarkable moment in terms of individual wealth. And I think the real question is, how far does it go? Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power.

2:11I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Tuesday, June 16th.

2:20Coming up on the show, Who wants to be a trillionaire?

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3:42Before the SpaceX IPO, before he was a trillionaire, you did the story where you tried to put into context just how wealthy Elon Musk is. Why is that such a difficult number to communicate? I mean, do we really understand how big a trillion dollars is? It's like, that's usually the kind of number that we talk about when we talk about economies, when we talk about GDP growth, not when we talk about companies, even. Very few companies until recently even had a trillion dollar market capitalization, which means the total value of what investors think they're worth going forward. Only a handful of companies have reached that level.

4:22But now we're talking about an individual. And that's just totally new territory. Right. It's hard to wrap your mind around that number, much less what it could mean for a single human being. Exactly. So how did you wind up explaining it? I mean, the only thing you can do is compare it to other things, right? You could say, oh, a trillion is a thousand billion, but that doesn't really do much. That doesn't help me. Right. What's a billion, right? So we decided we were going to try to put it in the context of everyday things. Okay. So just shy of a trillion dollars, where he was before the IPO, he could buy 2.4 million houses in the United States at the typical sale price at the beginning of this year.

5:05For context, the median sale price for a house in the U.S. in the first quarter of 2026 was about$400 ,000. So Musk could buy 2.4 million of those. I mean, that's just the beginning, right? He could also buy all the NFL and NBA teams, every one of them, and still have$500 billion left over.

5:30Another way to think about it, imagine you see a penny on the street and don't bother picking it up. What would be the equivalent to that penny for Elon Musk? If you do the math on that, if you make about$100 ,000 a year, that penny you might walk by, that's the equivalent of$97 ,000 to Elon Musk. And again, that was before the IPO. Musk's journey from startup guy to trillionaire spans about 30 years. Can you walk us through his financial resume? Like, where does this money come from? He started out in the mid-90s. He co-founded a company that essentially was one of the dot-com boom companies.

6:16That company was called Zip2. And when it sold, Musk walked away with about$22 million. He then ended up creating and helping to found and run a payments company, one of the precursors to PayPal as we know it today. Musk's payments company combined with PayPal, making him more than$100 million in 2002. From there, he went on to found or back a variety of different ventures. He became an early investor in a small car company. There were times in Tesla's history where it looked like things were really struggling. But he took over Tesla and kind of set it in the direction that ended up making it the first really popular and arguably sexy electric car company.

7:05He launched The Boring Company, with the promise to build underground tunnels for cars that would solve traffic problems. Elon Musk's Boring Company today got the mayoral nod to Dig Deep, a tunnel for a high-speed trip from downtown Chicago to O 'Hare Airport. The Boring Company drills tunnels. He sort of had this big vision of the Hyperloop, which was, you know, this idea that you could have very fast mass transit, And that does not seem to have a lot of traction at this point. The Boring Company has struck agreements with a number of cities, though it's only completed one tunnel in Las Vegas.

7:42Musk also co-founded Neuralink, a startup that's trying to develop brain implant technology. And, of course, there's SpaceX.

7:55Though the company's financial engine is Starlink, a satellite internet service, SpaceX promises to build towards commercial spaceflight. SpaceX just pulled off a test launch of its latest Starship mega rocket. So here's what it sounded like when it took off from the launch pad in South Texas. By 2012, Musk had become a billionaire, and his wealth kept growing. You can see how the value of some of his portfolio now lets him do things in other parts of his portfolio as well. And it's kind of a snowball. It's kind of a snowball effect. In 2021, Musk became the richest person in the world for the first time.

8:38You know, for a long time, Musk was in that conversation along with people like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. But those other guys are like down in the, it's crazy to say, down in the$200 billion range. And Musk has, you know, clearly exploded beyond that. When and sort of how did that start to happen? I mean, some of this was just in the past year, really. When we looked at American billionaires in late summer, early fall last year, He was ahead of the other big tech billionaires, but not by such a huge amount. At the time, his wealth was valued at$423 billion. It's more than doubled since.

9:24At this point, you know, you can add up Bezos and Ellison and Zuckerberg's wealth, and it's still not Elon Musk's. Is there a historic analog for this level of wealth for a single person? Like, does Elon Musk have more money now than, like, John D. Rockefeller did in his time? Yeah, I mean, you know, Rockefeller has for a century been sort of the icon of the individual wealthy man, right? Musk overshadows Rockefeller in, again, ways that are sort of hard to wrap your head around, right? Because it's a different time. You know, any dollar figure you can put on John D. Rockefeller's wealth in 1937 is not a dollar figure that applies today.

10:12But like Rockefeller, whose wealth was largely tied up in standard oil, a lot of Musk's wealth isn't liquid. Elon Musk's wealth is not cash. Elon Musk's wealth is almost all tied up in his companies. And some of that we can see directly with Tesla and now SpaceX. Some of it we can't. Altogether, I'll try to estimate his wealth outside his companies, about$100 billion, a little more. So that's a much smaller number, obviously. It's still a very large number. To the extent that his money's tied up in his companies, you can't just go spend it. So, you know, these analogies we're making are analogies.

10:50They're not, oh, hey, he could actually go out and buy 2.4 million houses. Because once he starts selling shares, the market is going to notice. That's pretty common for many CEOs and founders. Why would people believe in and invest in your company when you're selling your shares? But Teo says it's an even more unique situation for Musk because of the cult of personality that's developed around him. Elon Musk is a very unusual case. A lot of his company's value is tied up in his investors' belief that he can do remarkable things with these companies and that he can get these companies to do remarkable things.

11:30So, you know, he can't just go selling, right? That would be a huge problem for his wealth in addition to for all the other shareholders. Because his wealth is largely tied up in his companies, Musk has made some deals that leverage those companies against each other. That's how he was able to buy Twitter in 2022, for example. So when Musk bought Twitter, he borrowed a billion dollars from SpaceX. So to buy a company, he borrowed a billion dollars from a company he owned. Now, he paid it back very quickly. We don't know where he got the funds to pay it back. It could have been borrowing against something else like Neuralink or the Boring Company.

12:07So, you know, there is a certain amount of all of this is interconnected, At least as long as Musk is running it and as long as he owns significant stakes in it. But with all that interconnectedness, where is the line between Musk and his companies? That's next.

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13:35For many investors, Elon Musk is a visionary. And Musk has built a brand around that narrative, driving a lot of the interest in his businesses. Is it the companies or is it Musk or is it both? I think it has to be both, right? I mean, you know, if Elon Musk didn't have the companies, probably people would back him to start companies. If these companies were run by someone other than Elon Musk, well, we saw a little bit of that in recent years when Tesla was very worried that Musk was not really paying enough attention to the company. He was running Doge. He was getting into politics. Musk spent lots of time campaigning for President Trump and later leading the Department of Government Efficiency.

14:18Musk has also been focusing heavily on XAI, another venture of his that's since been rolled into SpaceX. All to say, Musk has at times had a lot on his plate. And Teo says that has rattled investors. Like in 2024, when Tesla's shares dropped roughly 30 percent. So you do see these moments where his involvement comes into question, and that does weigh on the stock price. But it's the continuing confidence that investors have that he'll manage somehow. So even when there was worry about him not giving his all to Tesla, I mean, the stock didn't tank, right? So either it's not all him or investors were pretty sure he'd come back around because, after all, a lot of his wealth is tied up in Tesla.

15:11Tesla has a more traditional business structure with an independent board of directors and voting rights for retail investors. But Musk has complained that this setup doesn't give him enough control, and it's holding the company back. Tesla CEO Elon Musk threatening he needs more control of Tesla if the company's AI ambitions are going to be met. And it's very clear from the structure of SpaceX that he didn't want to make that mistake again. He wanted to make sure that he had control. So, I mean, he has control in so many ways, it's hard to wrap your head around. I've never seen anything like him.

15:48After the SpaceX IPO, Musk held on to more than 80 percent of the company voting rights, and he serves as the CEO and chairman of the board of directors.

16:01To signal to investors that he is locked in, Musk prefers to take pay packages in huge amounts of stock tied to specific milestones. At SpaceX, one of these outlandish goals is to put a million-person colony on Mars. Another part of it is tied to having a really phenomenal amount of computing power in space. I mean, it's, again, one of these numbers that you can't really wrap your head around. But believe me, it is enormous. Either of those is, at this point, a pie-in-the-sky goal. At the same time, though, if he never hits those goals, he's still the richest man on the planet by a lot. He's still the richest man on the planet.

16:39And because of the way that SpaceX pay package was structured, he can still vote those shares that he will only get if he establishes a million-person colony on Mars. So Martian colony or not, Musk is the world's first trillionaire. What could that mean for other ultra-wealthy people? So I've never had a billion dollars, much less hundreds of billions. But I'm told that for people who make this kind of money, it's more about a scorecard than about what you can actually do with the money. A lot of this money will not be spent for billionaires. Plenty of billionaires, some like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, have said, I'm going to give essentially all of it away.

17:25Others are happy to spend it on super yachts or acquiring companies or funding their kids' business ventures or whatever. but in many ways these are their scorecards. That's the kind of thing that spurs competition. There is probably, at least among some billionaires, a sense that, well, if he can do it, maybe I can too. And I guess this is the question to ask here. How unique is Musk's situation? Like, has he cracked some code about how to manage money and make money that other mega-rich people can try to follow themselves? You know, there's a sort of a trope about Apple, that Apple doesn't necessarily invent a technology, but it puts that technology to use and to market in ways that are way more successful than anyone else.

18:22The iPod was the most successful, but not the first MP3 player. I think you can look at Elon Musk that way as well. in the sense that was Musk the beneficiary of a unique or highly unusual set of circumstances, right? Certain kinds of technological change don't happen very often. There was probably a point at which an American electric automaker was going to do really well. And it was Tesla. And that's not to take anything away from it. That's success. but it may not be the kind of opportunity that is available in every industry at every moment for every company.

19:13That's all for today, Tuesday, June 16th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode from Juliet Chung and Max Rust.

19:27Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

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