Elon Musk is on the brink of becoming the world’s first trillionaire because of SpaceX’s dramatic revaluation and his successful legal wranglings.
The Tesla and SpaceX chief executive’s personal fortune has exploded so rapidly that analysts now say he could cross the $1 trillion net-worth threshold later this year.
Despite political upheaval and wildly differing successes across his business empire, the so-called ‘four-comma club’ is in reaching distance for him.
The world’s richest man’s net worth has climbed to roughly $726 billion, more than doubling in just a year, according to estimates cited by the Wall Street Journal.
This comes as SpaceX has been valued as high as $800 billion in recent secondary share sales as the private rocket company prepares to go public in 2026.
With Musk owning roughly 42% of the company, the long-anticipated public offering could push his personal stake past the trillion-dollar mark almost overnight.
Two weeks ago, Musk’s fortune soared further when the Delaware Supreme Court reversed a prior ruling that had blocked his 2018 Tesla pay package, which is now valued at roughly $139 billion.
This decision cleared a major legal obstacle that had impeded his wealth for years.
This massive milestone for Musk would be achieved before receiving a penny from his new $1 trillion Tesla pay package that shareholders approved last fall.
The controversial package could eventually be worth close to $1 trillion on its own if he achieves an ambitious set of performance targets that would radically reshape the company into an AI and robotics powerhouse.
Musk has repeatedly said he expects software updates to allow hundreds of thousands of Teslas to operate autonomously without human intervention by the end of this year.
The car company is also planning to begin production of its AI-powered Cybercab this year.
Tesla struggles and Grok controversies
However, this surge in Musk’s wealth comes as Tesla struggles in the marketplace.
On Friday, the electric car company reported that it delivered 1.64 million vehicles in 2025.
This 9% decline from the previous year is the company’s second annual drop.
The company also lost its title as the world’s top electric-vehicle car seller as it was overtaken by China’s BYD, which sold 2.26 million vehicles last year.
Tesla’s reversal in success has been fueled by customer backlash over Musk’s right-wing political positions, the expiration of US tax credits and growing global competition.
Over the past year, Musk rose to remarkable influence in Washington due to his bromance with Donald Trump before it imploded in full public view.
There has also been controversy surrounding Musk’s social media platform X as his AI chatbot, Grok, published antisemitic posts.
In one post, Grok even called itself ‘MechaHitler’ in July and Metro has recently found the AI chatbot generating images of partially-naked people without the subject’s consent.
However, after Charlie Kirk’s death, Musk later appeared to soften tensions.
How did Elon Musk make his money?
Despite rumours, Elon was given a head start in life through his dad Errol’s emerald mine in South Africa, Elon has always insisted he put himself through college.
Elon Musk posted on X ‘the fake emerald mine thing is so annoying (sigh),’ when his mother, Maye Musk, shared a CBS News article on Twitter that made the claims.
‘He didn’t own an emerald mine & I worked my way through college, ending up ~$100k in student debt,’ Elon Musk tweeted in 2019.
Musk dropped out of his physics graduate degree programme at Stanford University and founded two technology start-ups -a web software firm (Zip2) and an online banking company (X.com) which later turned into PayPal.
In 1999, Zip2 was sold to Compaq for $307 million and X.com was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002.
He invested this money made into several high-profile companies including SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, The Boring Company.
In October 2022, Musk took over the social media platform Twitter, rebranding it to X, with new premium subscriptions.
He was also an early investor in ChatGPT’s parent company, before leaving and setting up his own company called xAI.
The world's richest people
- Elon Musk with a net worth of $717.9B
- Larry Page, co-founder of Google, with a net worth of $258.3B
- Larry Ellison, co-founder and chief technology officer of Oracle, with a net worth of $245.3B
- Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chairman of Amazon, with a net worth of $238.6B
- Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, with a net worth of $238.4B
- Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta and co-founder of Facebook, with a net worth of $223B
- Bernard Arnault and family, CEO of Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy (LVMH), with a net worth of $192.1B
- Jensen Huang, president and CEO of NVIDIA, with a net worth of $163.9B
- Warren Buffett, chairperson of Berkshire Hathaway, with a net worth of $146.8B
- Amancio Ortega, founder of Zara, Warren Buffett, chairperson of Berkshire Hathaway, with a net worth of $145B
Source: Forbes
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