Is Elon Musk really a trillionaire? Only on paper
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Well, that’s a fun ride, isn’t it?
SpaceX, which is controlled by Elon Musk, went public on June 12 at a stratospheric valuation that made Musk the first trillionaire in history.
He retained that status, according to Bloomberg’s billionaires index, for 11 days after the initial public offering, or until the stock price drifted back to Earth and Musk’s fortune fell to as low as $942 billion, by Bloomberg’s reckoning.
On Monday and Tuesday, his fortune crept back to a hair above $1 trillion as SpaceX gained 11.5% and Tesla, Musk’s other public company, gained 10.8%. These are the core of his net worth, which Bloomberg pegged as $1.05 trillion Tuesday.
You only set up an IPO like this to enable insiders to dump their stakes.
— Musk critic will Lockett
Yet the tsunami of publicity about Musk’s trillionaireship dodges an important question: Has he ever really been a trillionaire?
The answer, if one examines the basis for the claim, is no. At best, he is a trillionaire on paper, but even that description is dubious.
One reason for the fascination with Musk’s status as a “trillionaire” may be the very human difficulty of grasping such a big number. We can comprehend 1 million, and even that 1 billion is one thousand millions. But a trillion — in other words, one thousand billions?
In his classic book “Innumeracy,” mathematician John Allen Paulos observed that people are inclined to think that 1 trillion and 1 billion are about as close together as 1 billion and 1 million. They’re not. In his book, Paulos tries to illustrate the difference by noting that the passage of 1 million seconds would put us back by about two weeks, the elapsed time of 1 billion seconds would be a little less than 32 years, and 1 trillion seconds was nearly 32,000 years ago — back to the paleolithic era, the dawn of modern humans and tens of thousands of years before the beginning of recorded time.
When it comes to Musk’s fortune, it might help to contemplate some things he could buy if he liquidated all his stock in Tesla and SpaceX to place $1 trillion in his hands: about 8,900 Boeing 737 airplanes, 1,667 Trump ballrooms (at the latest cost estimate of $600 million each) or almost four Jeff Bezoses (at the latter’s estimated fortune of $262 billion). Or he could buy more than 3,400 U.S. elections, based on his documented political contributions of $291 million to Republicans in the 2024 election cycle.
For all that, the description of Musk as a trillionaire rests on the debatable value of SpaceX, which accounts — by Bloomberg’s estimate — for nearly 78% of Musk’s net worth. (I asked SpaceX to comment on Musk’s trillionaire status, but didn’t hear back.)
This isn’t the first time that an estimate of someone’s wealth has stood atop a shaky pillar, and probably won’t be the last. Indeed, the very exercise of ranking people and families by wealth is itself doubtful.
For those whose fortunes rest on private businesses, it’s often based on suspect valuations by insiders.
Wall Street is moving to stuff SpaceX shares into small investors’ portfolios, exposing them to a potentially overpriced stock.
Even for those whose wealth comes mostly from publicly traded stocks and bonds like Musk, the exercise can be more an art than a science.
For the record:
9:03 a.m. July 1, 2026An earlier version of this column was updated to reflect Bloomberg’s revised calculation of Musk’s SpaceX holdings.
That brings us to the valuation of Musk’s SpaceX shares. According to the company’s financial filings, he owns 4.76 billion shares, with exercisable options for an additional 350 million shares. At Tuesday’s closing price of $170.86, his stake in shares and options came to about $873 billion.
His second-largest holding, 11% of Tesla, was worth about $174 billion at the EV company’s closing price Tuesday. Bloomberg added to its calculation Musk’s stakes in his private companies Neuralink and Boring Co., about $7 billion between them, chump change in Musk’s world. Throw in a few other billions here or there and you’re back over $1 trillion.
How bad are sales of Tesla’s Cybertrucks? Nearly 20% of the vehicles went to Elon Musk’s other companies, raising questions about the vehicle’s future.
But SpaceX stock has been exceedingly volatile. Most IPOs undergo a volatile period that can last for months or even more than a year. The SpaceX IPO had some peculiarities that have made the stock especially volatile, and betoken more volatility ahead.
Come July 7, the shares will be listed as part of the Nasdaq 100 index. That’s a fast-tracked listing compared with most other stocks, which have to “season” for as long as a year by showing sustainable profits and price action before being added to the index.
The listing is sure to trigger buying by mutual funds and exchange traded funds based on the index, because their holdings must reflect the index’s portfolio.
On the other side of the coin, SpaceX will allow some insiders to start cashing out early. The typical IPO locks insiders by prohibiting their sales for at least six months. SpaceX insiders, however, can sell up to 20% of their shares as soon as the second day after the company’s second-quarter earnings report, expected around Aug. 11 —in other words, about two months after the IPO.
If the shares trade for a period prior to the earnings release at 30% over the IPO price, or about $175.50, the insiders can sell up to 30% of their stakes. That could expose the shares to intensifying selling pressure in the days and weeks before the lockups are lifted.
Due in part to these unusual countervailing forces, the trading pattern of SpaceX shares has resembled that of a penny stock on the pink sheets. They peaked on June at $225.64, a gain of more than 50% from the $150 opening trade on IPO day; but on June 22 they fell to $154.60 from $185 on the previous trading day, June 18, a one-day drop of 16.4%.
That raises the question whether it’s proper to count Musk’s unsold SpaceX shares as part of his current net worth. To be fair, investors, from the smallest retail plungers to the biggest institutions, commonly “mark to market” their unsold stock and bond holdings, counting them as part of their net worth at their current prices. That’s fair because those investors can liquidate those holdings if they choose to, or have to.
Musk’s SpaceX shares are different, however. According to the company’s registration statement, he and other top insiders are forbidden to sell, lend them out or borrow against them, among other restrictions, for 366 days after the IPO. Are they really his to count as part of his net worth until the restrictions are lifted? Reasonable analysts may differ.
A Yale study finds that Musk’s partisan activities cost Tesla sales to Democrats, but didn’t get offset by sales to Republicans.
Musk probably doesn’t need a written order not to touch his shares. He’s like a prisoner in a pen of his own making. SpaceX is such a cult holding that he knows that at the first hint that he was selling or pledging his shares, he would reap the whirlwind. The speed of the rush for the exits would be measured in nanoseconds.
The question at hand is SpaceX’s turbocharged market value, and whether it’s sustainable. It has been widely remarked that the shares’ issue price of $135, much less their peak of $225.64 on June 16, bears no relation to how they would be valued in conventional securities analysis, which is tethered more or less to a company’s capital structure, earnings, cash flow and reasonable expectations for the future.
Rather, it’s based on investors’ faith in Musk and perhaps excitement about the company’s airy goals of building “the systems and technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.”
The $135 IPO price valued SpaceX at about 95 times 2025 revenue, an unprecedented multiple. As the veteran short-seller Jim Chanos observed on X, Amazon went public in 1997 at three times revenue, Google in 2004 at seven times revenue, and Meta (then Facebook) in 2012 at 20 times revenue — and promptly declined by 50%. “SpaceX dwarfs these numbers,” Chanos wrote on X.
Another feature of the SpaceX trade deserves notice: Only about 5% of the company’s shares were available for trading, a remarkably thin “float” for an IPO. At the same time, the company reserved some 20% of those shares for sales to small retail investors, a group that tends to be more inclined than institutional investors to buy or sell based not on sober analysis but on emotion.
The thin float and retail investor enticement created an artificial scarcity — if you were a small investor hankering for a piece of SpaceX action the only place to go was an overheated stock market. That was good for insiders, who can sell their shares into a hungry market, but perhaps not so good for those hungry buyers.
“You only set up an IPO like this to enable insiders to dump their stakes,” asserts Will Lockett, a devoted Musk skeptic.
The bottom line is that the SpaceX IPO appeared designed to pump up the stock’s value to the point of what Alan Greenspan might have called “irrational exuberance.” In turn that gave Musk — whether intentionally or coincidentally — bragging rights as a pioneering trillionaire.
He had to give up that mantle within days of the IPO, but now he has it back, narrowly. How long will he hold the trophy? Watch the price of SpaceX to know.
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Perspectives
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Ideas expressed in the piece
The article argues that Elon Musk’s “trillionaire” status is largely an illusion because it rests on an extremely volatile SpaceX valuation and stock prices that have already swung his fortune above and below the $1 trillion mark within days.[3][7][18]
It further contends that calling Musk a trillionaire conflates paper wealth with actual, spendable assets, noting that almost all of his fortune is tied up in equity stakes whose prices can collapse quickly and that are subject to strict lock‑ups and other restrictions.[3][2][4][18]
The piece suggests that wealth rankings themselves are dubious, especially for fortunes built on private or thinly traded businesses, because they depend on extrapolating full-company values from small slices of shares and insider-friendly valuations rather than from robust market discovery.[1][10][17]
In line with this skepticism, the article highlights how SpaceX’s record IPO priced only a small fraction of its shares at $135, yet implied a $1.77 trillion valuation, which many analysts see as detached from fundamentals like revenue, cash flow, and profits.[1][5][7][10]
The column underscores that multiple independent valuations put SpaceX’s intrinsic worth far below the IPO pricing—Morningstar estimates fair value at just $63 per share, and some analysts model equity value closer to $1.25–$1.3 trillion—supporting the view that the public price embodies “irrational exuberance” rather than sober analysis.[1][5][11]
The article emphasizes unusual IPO mechanics that, in its view, helped inflate the share price: a free float near 4–5%, heavy courting of retail investors, and fast‑track index inclusion rules that forced passive funds to buy at high valuations, amplifying demand despite limited supply.[4][10][13][20]
It also points to staggered insider lock‑ups that will allow large blocks of SpaceX stock to hit the market within months, arguing that the combination of thin float, impending insider sales, and speculative retail participation makes the stock trade more like a “penny stock” than a blue‑chip megacap.[2][4][8][16]
The piece notes that Musk himself is barred from selling, lending, or pledging his SpaceX shares for 366 days, questioning whether assets that cannot be sold, borrowed against, or otherwise accessed should realistically be counted as part of his present net worth.[2][4][10]
Building on this, the article contends that Musk’s status as a trillionaire is “only on paper,” because the market value of his holdings could not be realized in practice without collapsing the very prices on which the trillion-dollar figure depends.[3][11][18]
Finally, the column frames the SpaceX IPO as a playbook designed to maximize valuation and set up future insider exits—“you only set up an IPO like this to enable insiders to dump their stakes”—and argues that the trillionaire headline is a side effect of that financial engineering rather than proof of concrete, usable wealth.[4][10][19][18]
Different views on the topic
In contrast, wealth trackers and financial outlets treat Musk’s net worth as legitimately over $1 trillion under standard mark‑to‑market conventions, with Bloomberg, Forbes, and others explicitly declaring Musk the world’s first trillionaire based on the combined market value of his stakes in SpaceX, Tesla, and other ventures.[3][9][18]
These sources implicitly argue that unsold shares priced in public markets are part of an individual’s net worth, regardless of lock‑ups, because the owner retains the economic claim and control over the underlying businesses, and those shares can ultimately be sold or leveraged once restrictions expire.[3][2][4][18]
Some coverage emphasizes the historic scale and significance of SpaceX’s IPO itself—raising $75 billion and implying a $1.77 trillion valuation—as evidence that markets, not just hype, recognize the company as a transformative enterprise in launch services, satellite communications, and AI.[7][10][14]
Analysts like Aswath Damodaran present detailed valuation work suggesting that, even when stripping out IPO exuberance, SpaceX could reasonably be worth around $1.25–$1.3 trillion, indicating that very high values are not purely speculative and that the gap between price and value may be narrower than skeptics imply.[5]
Morningstar, while warning that the IPO is overvalued at $135, also outlines a “moonshot” scenario in which SpaceX could reach nearly $2 trillion in equity value, thereby acknowledging that, under optimistic growth assumptions, current or even higher valuations might be justified.[1]
Opposing perspectives further highlight that the IPO structure was not a simple insider cash‑out: filings show that only the company sold shares in the offering and no existing shareholders or early employees dumped stock at listing, which supporters see as consistent with using the capital raise to fund long‑term projects rather than to enrich insiders immediately.[2][4][7]
Commentators focused on passive investing note that, despite the headlines about “rules being bent,” initial index weights for SpaceX are expected to be modest—around 1% or less in relevant Vanguard portfolios—suggesting systemic risk to ordinary retirement savers may be limited and more manageable than critics fear.[13][20]
Some outlets and commentators frame Musk’s trillion-dollar fortune as world-altering in scale, arguing that even if most of it is illiquid equity, it reflects extraordinary value creation across industries and grants Musk the theoretical capacity to fund large-scale endeavors, from sports franchises to global humanitarian efforts.[6][12][15]
Supportive narratives emphasize that SpaceX’s success has already minted thousands of employee millionaires and large fortunes for early backers, portraying the IPO and Musk’s corresponding wealth as a byproduct of building reusable rockets, satellite networks, and cutting-edge technologies that many observers thought impossible.[14][7]
Finally, proponents of the conventional rich lists argue that the volatility and “paper” nature of Musk’s wealth are not unique, as virtually all major fortunes in the modern era fluctuate with market sentiment; on this view, Musk is a trillionaire under the same rules that have long applied to billionaire rankings, and singling out his case as illegitimate is seen as inconsistent.[3][18]
