Elon Musk Becomes the First Person Worth More Than $1 Trillion

Elon Musk became the first person in history whose estimated wealth tops $1 trillion after SpaceX, the company he founded, went public on the U.S. stock market on Friday, June 12, 2026. SpaceX shares jumped about 20% at the open, lifting the company’s valuation to roughly $2 trillion and making it the world’s sixth-largest company, ahead of giants such as Meta and Tesla.

Musk holds 46% of SpaceX shares. Combined with his stakes in Tesla and other holdings, the surge pushed his net worth above the trillion-dollar mark. The report stresses that this is paper wealth, not cash, and still depends on investor confidence, but notes that no one had reached that level before him.

Musk also owns more than $300 billion in Tesla stock and options. The SpaceX listing is expected to add more than $800 billion to his wealth, taking his combined holdings in the two companies past $1 trillion for the first time.

The article also says SpaceX has recently broadened beyond space into artificial intelligence, as Musk has folded xAI and the social network X, formerly Twitter, into the broader business. That has raised questions about what investors are actually buying. Economist Dr. Sindhu O’Sullivan, a former NASA employee, told the BBC that the merger creates a company that is hard to define, while Guardian columnist Nils Pratley called X “space junk that does not belong to SpaceX.”