SpaceX just raised $75 billion in the biggest IPO in financial history. Musk’s net worth is now $1.1 trillion. The numbers stopped making sense a long time ago.
We called it. A few weeks ago, we wrote about Elon Musk closing in on a trillion dollars. Now it’s done.
SpaceX raised $75 billion in its Initial Public Offering on Thursday, the largest IPO in financial history. When the stock begins trading on Friday, Musk’s net worth will exceed $1.1 trillion according to Forbes and Reuters calculations.
The world has its first dollar trillionaire. And it is the South African-born entrepreneur who once slept on the floor of his own office.
The second richest person on the planet, Google co-founder Larry Page, has been hovering around $300 billion. That is less than a third of what Elon Musk is now worth. To put that further in context, only one other person in history, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, has ever reached $400 billion. Elon Musk just nearly tripled that ceiling.
Where the money actually lives
Most of Elon Musk’s wealth now sits in SpaceX, where his stake alone is worth roughly $866 billion. The rest is spread across Tesla, X, xAI, Neuralink, and The Boring Company.
Together, this network of companies, which market observers have started calling the “Muskonomy”, forms an empire so intertwined with one person that analysts have coined a specific term for it: the “Elon premium.”
The idea that SpaceX’s valuation, which some put between $1.5 and $2 trillion, is less about traditional financial metrics and more about global faith in one man’s ability to keep delivering the impossible.
“Much like Tesla, SpaceX is a bet on Elon Musk,” said Matt Kennedy, senior strategist at Renaissance Capital. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, once a legal adversary of Musk, has since called him “the Edison of our time” and “our Einstein.” That kind of language from Wall Street tells you everything about how investors are thinking right now.
The complications nobody wants to ignore
The trillion-dollar milestone arrives with real baggage. Tesla sales weakened in several international markets in 2025 amid consumer boycotts tied to Musk’s political interventions, particularly his role in Donald Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency.”
His public feud with Trump, which followed a period of close alliance, later cooled but exposed how deeply his business empire and political ambitions have become entangled.
There are also legitimate concerns about corporate governance when this much power and wealth are concentrated around a single individual.
SpaceX remains cash-hungry, and significant parts of its valuation rest on technologies, Mars colonization, point-to-point rocket travel that may take decades to become commercially viable. Investors are essentially betting on a vision, not just a balance sheet.
The number that still doesn’t compute
We said it before and we’ll say it again: South Africa’s total household net wealth, the combined savings, property, pensions, and investments of all 65 million South Africans, stands at approximately $1.36 trillion. Elon Musk, one person, is now worth $1.1 trillion.
The gap between those two numbers is smaller than it has any right to be.
History has been made. Whether that is something to celebrate is a question worth sitting with.
Similar read: Elon Musk is worth nearly as much as 65 million South Africans
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