Elon Musk becomes world’s first trillionaire as SpaceX shares surge on Nasdaq debut
Elon Musk has become the first person in recorded history to accumulate a net worth of $1 trillion.
Elon Musk has become the first person in recorded history to accumulate a net worth of $1 trillion.
According to a Forbes report, the business magnate crossed the milestone on Friday after SpaceX shares opened trading on the Nasdaq at $150 per share, well above the $135 IPO price set just a day earlier.
SpaceX’s opening price implies a market capitalisation of nearly $2 trillion for the rocket and space exploration company, cementing its place among the most valuable businesses ever listed on a public exchange.
Forbes estimates Musk’s fortune at $1.1 trillion as of Friday, up from $982 billion on Thursday when SpaceX priced its initial public offering, making him not just the world’s richest person by a vast margin but the first individual ever to reach the 12-figure threshold.
Bill Gates became the first person worth $100 billion in 1999, but the dotcom crash quickly erased that milestone. The $100 billion threshold was not crossed again until 2017, when Bezos became the second person ever to reach it. Elon Musk has now lapped that figure more than ten times over.
The bulk of Musk’s $1.1 trillion fortune is tied to SpaceX, where his holdings have grown significantly since the company priced its IPO on Thursday.
Forbes’ current estimate of Musk’s net worth does not include performance-based restricted shares that could eventually lift his stakes in SpaceX and Tesla to 47% and 29% respectively, before taxes and the cost of unlocking those shares.
To earn that additional stock, Musk would need to hit a series of extraordinarily ambitious targets, including growing SpaceX’s market cap to $7.5 trillion and Tesla’s to $8.5 trillion, and establishing a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants.
Earlier, Nairametrics reported that Elon Musk’s net worth had climbed to an estimated $982 billion on Thursday after SpaceX priced its highly anticipated initial public offering at $135 per share.
According to a Forbes report, the IPO valued the space exploration company at approximately $1.8 trillion, bringing Musk closer than ever to becoming the first person in history to amass a trillion-dollar fortune.
The offering boosted Musk’s wealth by an estimated $188 billion in a single day, Forbes calculations showed, narrowing the gap between the world’s richest person and the unprecedented $1 trillion milestone.
