Elon Musk, a trillionaire despite it all

On Friday, June 12, Elon Musk rang the Nasdaq opening bell remotely from Starbase, his company town in South Texas, because a stock market launch apparently deserves an actual launch pad. By the close, SpaceX shares had gained 19% and his fortune had crossed a line no human being had ever approached, one trillion dollars^[1]. The world now has its first trillionaire^[2], and it happens to be the man half the planet loves to hate.

An IPO for the history books

The numbers are dizzying even by space industry standards. SpaceX sold 555.6 million shares at $135 apiece and raised $75 billion, more than double the record Saudi Aramco had held since 2019 with $29.4 billion^[3]. The company landed on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX at a valuation of around $1.75 trillion^[4], instantly one of the most expensive companies on Earth, ahead of plenty of businesses that have the quaint habit of making money.

Because that's the delicious part: SpaceX lost $8.7 billion between early 2025 and March 2026, and Morningstar's analysts put its fair value at $780 billion, less than half the offering price^[5]. The market didn't buy a balance sheet, it bought a promise, namely a million-person Martian colony and data centers in orbit. Musk, meanwhile, keeps more than 80% of the voting power^[1:1], which lets him run his public company much like a private one. New shareholders are kindly asked to fasten their seat belts and enjoy the ride.

Hated, mocked, and yet

Consider the paradox. Few executives have been reviled like Musk, who poured some $300 million into Donald Trump's campaign and then took a chainsaw to entire branches of the federal government, including the aid agency USAID, with a human toll that Harvard researchers measure in hundreds of thousands of lives^[1:2]. The mockery hasn't been in short supply either, and I've passed along my share of it. All the while, the man kept stacking stages. In the summer of 2024 he was still trading the title of world's richest person with Jeff Bezos and Bernard Arnault, each hovering around $200 billion. By October 2025 he became the first to clear half a trillion. Today his fortune outweighs Bezos's and Arnault's combined, twice over^[3:1].

Laugh at the Mars obsession and the tantrums all you want, but honesty requires looking at the scoreboard: PayPal, Tesla and its 20,000% return since the 2010 IPO^[5:1], rockets that land upright when the whole industry swore it couldn't be done, Starlink beaming internet down from low orbit. One successful project can be luck, the right place at the right time. A dozen winning bets across twenty years and three industries is competence, whether you like the man or not. Hating someone has never been a reason to underestimate him; it's usually how you end up surprised.

Meanwhile, at the base of the rocket

The discomfort remains, and it isn't really about Musk; it's about what his trajectory tells us. According to Oxfam, billionaire wealth swelled 16% in 2025 to a record $18.3 trillion, up 81% since 2020, and the $2.5 trillion gained in a single year would be enough to end extreme poverty twenty-six times over^[6]. The twelve richest people on the planet own more than the poorest half of humanity, four billion human beings, and the average member of the top 1% holds 8,251 times the wealth of someone in that bottom half. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the gap has never been this wide or widened this fast.

Oxfam titled its report "Resisting the rule of the rich," because a fortune this size no longer buys just rockets. It buys political influence, media, and attention. When the first trillionaire in history also bankrolled the election of the president who let him carve up the state, the line between entrepreneurial success and democratic capture gets hard to draw, and that's a gentle slope you always walk down in good company.

So yes, hats off, sincerely. I admire the feat the way you admire fireworks, mouth open and head tilted back, while wondering who paid for the gunpowder. What about you, how does your first trillionaire make you feel?