Elon Musk is on pace to become the world’s first trillionaire by 2027, according to a new report from a group that tracks wealth.
Informa Connect Academy’s finding about the boss of the electric carmaker Tesla, private rocket company SpaceX and social media platform X (formerly Twitter) stems from the fact that Musk’s wealth has been growing at an average annual rate of 110%. He was also the world’s richest person, with $251bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, as the academy’s 2024 Trillion Dollar Club report began circulating on Friday.
The academy’s analysis suggested business conglomerate founder Gautam Adani of India would become the second to achieve trillionaire status. That would reportedly happen in 2028 if his annual growth rate remains at 123%.
Jensen Huang, the chief executive officer of the tech firm Nvidia, and Prajogo Pangestu, the Indonesian energy and mining mogul, could also become trillionaires in 2028 if their trajectories hold. Bernard Arnault, the LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton boss and the world’s third-richest person with about $200bn, is on track to eclipse a trillion dollars in 2030 – the same year as Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta.
A handful of companies have secured valuations of more than $1tn. Berkshire Hathaway most recently topped the valuation in late August, days before its architect Warren Buffett celebrated his 94th birthday. Nvidia joined the $1tn club in May 2023 and in June hit $3tn, positioning it at the time after Microsoft and before Apple as the world’s second-most-valuable company.
However, as CNBC noted, the question of who might be the globe’s first trillionaire has fascinated the public ever since the world crowned its first billionaire in 1916. That was the US’s John D Rockefeller, the founder and at the time largest shareholder of Standard Oil.
Despite that fascination, many academics see the accumulation of immense wealth as a social ill. One report calculated that the richest 1% of humanity account for more carbon emissions – a primary driver of the ongoing climate crisis – than the poorest 66%.
Just days before Informa Connect Academy tapped Musk as the most likely to become the world’s first trillionaire, one of his posts on X earned him backlash from many of the site’s users.
His post said an interview between the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and the podcaster Darryl Cooper – a fellow rightwing media figure – was “very interesting. Worth watching.”
Cooper claimed in the interview that the Nazis did not mean to murder so many people when they carried out the Holocaust and killed 6 million Jews during the second world war. Instead, Cooper remarked, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime simply was not equipped to care for them – and the podcaster blamed the British prime minister Winston Churchill for “that war becoming what it did”.
Musk ultimately deleted his post, and the White House condemned Carlson’s interview of Cooper as “a disgusting and sadistic insult to all Americans”.
The billionaire announced in August that he was supporting Donald Trump as the Republican nominee seeks a second presidency in November’s election. Kamala Harris, the Democratic vice-president, is also running in the election.
