Elon Musk, the CEO of two large companies, is rich. In fact, the other day, he became a trillionaire. Written out, a trillion looks like this:
1,000,000,000,000
But after trading on Monday, his net worth shot up to $1.3 trillion according to the Forbes rich-person-wealth-tracker site. The next person down the list from Musk, Google co-founder Larry Page, has $301.4 billion. Elon Musk has, in other words, not just a trillion dollars, but approximately a trillion dollars more than the next richest guy.
This is counted (or maybe just rounded) differently by Bloomberg, which says Musk’s net worth is only $1.27 trillion. Unfortunately for Musk, assuming that’s the correct calculation, Musk would not still be the richest person in the world if he lost $1 trillion of net worth—but in either case, he would still be the richest person in the world if he lost $900 billion.
To be clear, it’s not like he crossed the threshold into having a 13-figure net worth because he did a good job as CEO that day and profits poured into SpaceX or Tesla, and that money funneled down to him. It doesn’t work that way. The approximately 42% of SpaceX that Musk owns increased in value as people eagerly bought up the stock as it became publicly available, pushing up the total valuation of the company. That’s how we measure the wealth of tycoons.
That also means an especially good or bad trading day for SpaceX or Tesla—of which Musk owns about 12.8%—will continue to cause vertigo-inducing fluctuations in Musk’s net worth from day to day. He lost $100 billion in a year back in 2022, which was extraordinary at the time. But he gained at least that much on Monday alone. If that depresses you, think of how much he could lose the next day. Or the day after that.
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