He said he’d do it. Most people laughed. Nobody’s laughing now.
Elon Musk has become the world’s first trillionaire, with Bloomberg’s wealth index putting his net worth at a staggering $1.11 trillion. The milestone, once the stuff of science fiction, arrived on the back of SpaceX’s blockbuster debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange, where the rocket company listed at a valuation of $2.2 trillion, instantly making it one of the most valuable businesses on the planet.
To put that number in perspective, $2.2 trillion is roughly the entire GDP of Italy. SpaceX, a company Musk founded in 2002 after reportedly being laughed out of a meeting with Russian rocket officials, is now worth more than most countries.
The listing sent shockwaves through Wall Street and Silicon Valley alike. Investors who’d waited years for SpaceX to go public finally got their moment, and they did not hold back. Shares surged in early trading, cementing Musk’s personal fortune well clear of his nearest rivals on the Bloomberg rich list, including Jeff Bezos and Bernard Arnault, who are both hovering around the $200 billion mark.
Musk’s wealth is now so vast it’s genuinely difficult to contextualise. If he spent a million pounds every single day, it would take him roughly 3,000 years to get through it. Critics have pointed out the absurdity of one person accumulating this level of wealth while wages in the US and UK continue to stagnate, and that conversation is unlikely to go away.
“There’s something deeply uncomfortable about a single individual owning more than entire national economies,” wrote economist Daniela Gabor on social media shortly after the news broke. “We need to ask what this concentration of power actually means for democracy.”
Musk, for his part, has shown little interest in the philosophical debate. He posted a single rocket emoji on X shortly after the bell rang on Wall Street.
With SpaceX now publicly traded and its Starship programme edging closer to Mars missions, the question isn’t really whether Musk’s fortune will grow further. It’s whether the world has any idea what to do when it does.
