Elon Musk Becomes World’s First Trillionaire as SpaceX Stock Begins Trading
With SpaceX shares soaring 20 percent on their first day of trading, the world’s richest person crossed another milestone — one with 13 digits.
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 Friday.
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.
