Elon Musk: The World’s First (Theoretical) Trillionaire

The world’s richest man Elon Musk passed a round-number milestone on Friday, becoming the world’s first trillionaire. Well, kinda.

On June 12th, Musk’s orbital contractor SpaceX went public, and the price of $135 per share would value Musk’s shares in the company at $867 billion. On paper, this pushes him over the trillionaire line, though as the Washington Post points out, that number is somewhere between “exaggerated” and “imaginary.”

A good chunk of Musk’s wealth comes in the form of conditional Tesla stock, and the conditions are kind of hard to meet — like, for example, establishing a human colony on Mars. If you ignore the value of those shares, Musk is still several billion short of a trillion, the poor guy.

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Then there’s the question of whether the companies are worth as much as the public is paying. The SpaceX valuation is pretty shocking considering the company isn’t profitable . The market is valuing SpaceX as being worth more than America’s six-largest defense contractors combined , and those companies are filling up swimming pools with cash. As we saw with Tesla stock, the public is betting on Musk personally while almost ignoring the fundamentals of the company. Good luck to my brother-in-law, a big Musk backer, and to all the other brothers-in-law of the world betting on SpaceX right now. And in a few years, we probably still won’t have a colony on Mars, but Musk might actually be a trillionaire.

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_Originally reported by [Consequence](https://consequence.net/2026/06/elon-musk-worlds-first-trillionaire/)._