Elon Musk Just Officially Became The World's First Trillionaire

Something insane just happened. Elon Musk just became the world's first trillionaire.

For the last few decades, the idea that humanity would have a citizen with a net worth of $1 trillion felt like a distant, almost science fiction concept. Elon Musk was obviously the leading candidate to pull it off, but the math always seemed to require one more impossible thing to happen. Tesla had to soar. SpaceX had to go public. Starlink had to prove it could justify a valuation normally reserved for the biggest technology giants on Earth.

In the last year or so, the idea that Elon Musk would become the world's first trillionaire started becoming more and more real and less like science fiction fantasy. Generally speaking, though, most wealth observers predicted that Elon MIGHT become a trillionaire when SpaceX actually went public. Not when the company filed confidential paperwork. Not when bankers whispered about a $2 trillion valuation. Not when private-market investors marked up their shares. The clean, official moment was supposed to arrive when SpaceX began trading on Nasdaq under the ticker "SPCX," allowing the public market to assign a real-time value to Musk's stake in the rocket, satellite, and artificial intelligence company.

SpaceX is scheduled to go public tomorrow, Friday, June 12. But IPOs do not begin the moment a stock starts trading on an exchange. The actual sale of shares typically happens the day before. The company and its bankers collect investor orders, set the final IPO price, allocate shares to institutions and retail platforms, and formally sell the offering. Then, the next morning, those shares begin trading publicly.

That's what happened today.

On Thursday, SpaceX officially priced the largest IPO in world history. The company sold 555.6 million shares at $135 apiece, raising $75 billion. At that price, SpaceX is valued at $1.77 trillion, or roughly $1.8 trillion on a fully diluted basis. The offering was more than four times oversubscribed. Retail investors alone reportedly placed more than $100 billion in orders. BlackRock reportedly asked for at least $5 billion worth of shares.

And based on CelebrityNetWorth's current $800 billion estimate for Elon Musk's fortune, today's IPO pricing appears to have made him the first trillionaire in history.

Britta Pedersen-Pool/Getty Images

The Trillion-Dollar Math

Here is the math.

Before today, CelebrityNetWorth pegged Elon Musk's net worth at $800 billion. That estimate already made him the richest person in the world by an almost absurd margin, but it still left him $200 billion short of the trillion-dollar mark.

The key is how much of that $800 billion was already tied to SpaceX.

Musk's non-SpaceX assets, primarily his Tesla stake and stakes in other companies, are worth roughly $260 billion. That means our previous $800 billion estimate effectively valued his SpaceX stake at around $540 billion.

That lines up with SpaceX's earlier private valuation. Earlier this year, SpaceX combined with Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI in a deal that valued the combined company at roughly $1.25 trillion. A 43% stake in a $1.25 trillion company is worth:

• $1.25 trillion x 43% = $537.5 billion

So far, so good. But SpaceX did not price today's IPO at $1.25 trillion.

It priced at $1.77 trillion. If Musk owns roughly 43% of SpaceX, his stake is now worth:

• $1.77 trillion x 43% = $761.1 billion

Now add back the roughly $260 billion in non-SpaceX assets:

• $761.1 billion + $260 billion = $1.021 trillion

That is $1,021,000,000,000.

This Is Before The Stock Even Starts Trading

The truly wild part is that this calculation is based on the IPO price. SpaceX shares have not even started trading on the open market yet.

That happens tomorrow.

If SpaceX opens flat at $135, CNW's math already puts Musk slightly above $1 trillion. If SpaceX rises on its first day of trading, the number gets even more ridiculous very quickly.

• A 5% first-day pop would lift SpaceX's valuation to roughly $1.86 trillion. Musk's stake would gain around $38 billion, pushing his net worth to about $1.06 trillion.
• A 10% pop would lift SpaceX's valuation to roughly $1.95 trillion. Musk's stake would gain around $76 billion, pushing his net worth to about $1.10 trillion.
• A 20% pop would lift SpaceX's valuation to roughly $2.12 trillion. Musk's stake would gain around $152 billion, pushing his net worth to roughly $1.17 trillion.

That 20% scenario is not some random fantasy number. Pre-IPO perpetual futures tied to SpaceX have recently traded around $162, roughly 20% above the $135 IPO price. Those markets are speculative and dominated by aggressive crypto traders, so they are not a perfect predictor of Friday's trading. But they do suggest that investors are at least bracing for a meaningful first-day move.

The Biggest IPO Ever

Even if Elon Musk were not involved, the SpaceX IPO would be historic.

Saudi Aramco raised $29.4 billion in 2019. Alibaba raised $25 billion in 2014. Facebook, now Meta, raised $16 billion in 2012. Uber raised $8.1 billion in 2019.

SpaceX just raised $75 billion.

And the deal could get even larger. SpaceX has given its underwriting banks an over-allotment option to buy an additional 83.3 million shares at the IPO price. If fully exercised, that would push the total deal size to roughly $86 billion.

Why SpaceX Is Worth This Much

SpaceX is not being valued like a normal rocket company because investors do not see it as a normal rocket company.

The company has several businesses and ambitions stacked on top of each other:

• Falcon rockets and reusable launch services
• NASA and defense contracts
• Starlink satellite internet
• Starship and heavy-lift space infrastructure
• xAI and artificial intelligence
• Potential space-based data centers
• Long-term Mars colonization plans

The conservative version of the SpaceX story is that it dominates launch, builds Starlink into a massive broadband business, and becomes a core defense and communications contractor.

The aggressive version is that SpaceX becomes the physical infrastructure layer for the next era of artificial intelligence: satellites, data centers, energy, launch capacity, and orbital computing, all controlled by one company.

There Are Plenty Of Reasons To Be Skeptical

To be clear, none of this means SpaceX is cheap. None of this means the stock will go straight up.

SpaceX is reportedly still unprofitable. Its valuation depends heavily on future businesses that are either extremely young, extremely expensive, or not yet proven at scale. Some of the company's biggest long-term ambitions, including space-based data centers, lunar factories, and a permanent Mars colony, still sound like science fiction.

There are also governance concerns. Musk is expected to retain overwhelming voting control after the IPO, which means public shareholders will have limited power over the company's direction. If Musk wants to pour tens of billions of dollars into Mars rather than return capital to shareholders, investors may have little ability to stop him.

Veteran short-seller Jim Chanos has reportedly called SpaceX a "hopes-and-dreams IPO." That criticism is not crazy. SpaceX is being valued on a vision of the future more than on current profits.

But that has been true of Musk before.

Tesla looked absurdly expensive for much of its public life. Then it became one of the most valuable companies in the world. SpaceX may prove the skeptics wrong. It may prove them right. It may do both at different points over the next decade. For today, this is the only financial milestone that matters: Elon Musk is now a trillionaire.