Tesla and SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk has made history as the first individual to attain a net worth exceeding $1 trillion, according to a report by CNN on Friday.
The unprecedented achievement follows the highly successful public listing of SpaceX, Musk’s aerospace company, which made its debut on the stock market.
SpaceX launched its initial public offering (IPO) at $135 per share, a move that pushed Musk’s estimated wealth beyond the $1 trillion mark.
Trading under the ticker symbol SPCX on the Nasdaq exchange, the company’s shares surged to $165 shortly after trading began, representing an increase of about 22 per cent from the IPO price. The jump boosted SpaceX’s market value to more than $2 trillion.
Prior to the IPO, Musk’s fortune was already estimated at $813 billion. According to Forbes, that figure was more than double the wealth of the world’s second-richest person, Google co-founder Larry Page, whose net worth stands at roughly $288 billion.
With his latest financial milestone, Musk’s fortune is now greater than the combined wealth of the next three individuals on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Oracle founder Larry Ellison.
The valuation also places SpaceX among America’s largest publicly traded corporations. The company currently ranks sixth in market value, trailing only Nvidia, Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon.
SpaceX oversees several major ventures, including Starlink, its rapidly expanding and profitable satellite internet business, as well as xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence firm responsible for developing the Grok chatbot.
