Elon Musk became the world's first trillionaire this week after the record-breaking stock market debut of SpaceX in New York, with Forbes calculating his net worth at around $1.3 trillion the vast majority of it tied up not in bank accounts, but in shares of his own companies.
SpaceX, listed under the name Space Exploration Technologies, completed an initial public offering that catapulted the rocket maker to a market value of about $2.6 trillion. Musk's personal holding in SpaceX, including stock options, is put at a little over 38%, giving him roughly $1 trillion of paper wealth from that stake alone. Add in his roughly 10% holding in Tesla, now valued at around $1.5 trillion, and it becomes clearer how one man has ended up sitting on a fortune that exceeds the annual output of many countries.
