Elon Musk just became the world’s first trillionaire.
With SpaceX opening on the Nasdaq at $150 a share Friday, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla now has a stake in SpaceX that’s worth more than $766 billion. Combined with his Tesla stake, which is worth $280 billion, Musk’s net worth from both companies as of Friday was roughly $1.05 trillion.
The SpaceX IPO added more than $180 billion to Musk’s fortune. He is now worth more than the next five richest billionaires in the world combined. His personal net worth is larger than the national GDP of Taiwan, Ireland or Sweden.
Musk’s coronation as the first person in history to be worth $1 trillion is likely to add fuel to the debate over wealth inequality and the rise in power of America’s richest tech founders. Along with creating the world’s first trillionaire, the SpaceX IPO also minted thousands of new millionaires and several new billionaires among the employees and executives who own stock.
Shares of SpaceX gained roughly 20% Friday to close just above $160 apiece. That values the company at more than $2 trillion.
Shares of Tesla rose almost 2% to roughly $406 apiece.
Musk was first declared a billionaire by Bloomberg and Forbes in 2012, with the latter estimating his net worth at $2.4 billion at the time.
His fortune reached $20 billion in 2019 and skyrocketed the following year after a Tesla stock split, making Musk the world’s fifth centibillionaire — worth more than $100 billion — by Forbes’ estimate. In the six years since, Musk’s net worth has grown roughly tenfold.
His fortune has surged by a rate unmatched even by the decade’s previous “world’s richest person” titleholders: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and Bernard Arnault, head of the luxury empire LVMH.
Google co-founder Larry Page, currently worth an estimated $295 billion, according to Forbes, takes a distant second place among the ranks of the world’s richest people.
Page is followed by a second Google co-founder, Sergey Brin; Bezos, and Oracle founder Larry Ellison, each worth more than $200 billion as of Friday, according to Forbes.
That said, Gates’ fortune would be a whopping $464 billion had he not given so much away to philanthropy, per Forbes‘ estimate.
