Elon Musk becomes a trillionaire despite it all

I'll admit I've passed along my share of Elon Musk jokes. And on Friday, June 12, while I was busy laughing, he rang the Nasdaq opening bell remotely from Starbase, his company town in South Texas, because a stock market launch apparently needs an actual launch pad. By the close, SpaceX shares were up 19%, and his fortune had crossed a line no human had ever come near, one trillion dollars¹. The world has its first trillionaire², and it's the man half the planet loves to hate.

An IPO for the history books

Even by space industry standards, this one makes you dizzy. SpaceX raised $75 billion, more than double the record Saudi Aramco had held since 2019³. It hit the Nasdaq at a valuation of around $1.75 trillion⁴, instantly one of the most expensive companies on Earth, ahead of plenty of businesses with the quaint habit of making money.

Because here's the fun part. SpaceX lost $8.7 billion between early 2025 and March 2026, and Morningstar's analysts put its fair value at less than half the offering price⁵. Basically, the market bought a promise instead of a balance sheet, namely a million-person Mars colony and data centers in orbit. Musk, meanwhile, keeps more than 80% of the voting power¹, so he can run his public company pretty much like a private one. New shareholders are kindly asked to fasten their seat belts.

Hated, mocked, and yet

Few CEOs have been as reviled as Musk. He poured some $300 million into Donald Trump's campaign, then took a chainsaw to whole branches of the federal government, including the aid agency USAID. Harvard researchers put the human cost in the hundreds of thousands of lives¹. You'll understand why I'm not running his fan club.

All the while, he 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. By October 2025, he was past half a trillion. Today his fortune is twice Bezos's and Arnault's combined³.

Make fun of the Mars obsession all you want, but look at the scoreboard. PayPal, Tesla and its 20,000% return since 2010⁵, rockets that land upright when the whole industry swore it couldn't be done, Starlink beaming internet down from low orbit. One success can be luck. A dozen winning bets across twenty years and three industries is skill, whether you like the guy or not. Honestly, hating someone has never been a reason to underestimate him. It's mostly how you end up surprised.

Meanwhile, at the base of the rocket

The discomfort is still there, and it has less to do with Musk than with what his story says. According to Oxfam, billionaire wealth grew 16% in 2025 to a record $18.3 trillion⁶. The twelve richest people on the planet own more than the poorest half of humanity, which is four billion people⁷. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the gap has never widened this fast.

Oxfam called its report "Resisting the rule of the rich." A fortune this size doesn't just buy rockets anymore. It buys political influence, media, and your attention. When the first trillionaire in history also bankrolled the president who let him carve up the government, the line between business success and capturing a democracy gets blurry. 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 still wondering who paid for the gunpowder.

Notes

1. TechCrunch, "Elon Musk becomes the world's first trillionaire after SpaceX's historic IPO", June 12, 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. A trillion is a thousand billions. Counting to it out loud, one number per second, would take you about 31,700 years, which is longer than the Mars colonization timeline, though at SpaceX's usual pace of schedule revisions, maybe not by much. ↩

3. Bloomberg, "SpaceX IPO makes Elon Musk world's first trillionaire" and "SpaceX raises $75 billion in record-breaking IPO", June 2026. SpaceX sold 555.6 million shares at $135 each, while Saudi Aramco's record stood at $29.4 billion. In the summer of 2024, Musk, Bezos, and Arnault were each hovering around $200 billion. ↩ ↩²

4. CNBC, "SpaceX IPO explained, the price is set", June 9, 2026. The stock trades under the ticker SPCX. ↩

5. PBS NewsHour, "Elon Musk could become the world's first trillionaire with SpaceX's IPO", June 2026. Morningstar values SpaceX at $780 billion. ↩ ↩²

6. Oxfam, "Resisting the rule of the rich", January 2026, released for the Davos forum. ↩

7. Oxfam also reports that this wealth is up 81% since 2020, and that the $2.5 trillion gained in a single year would be enough to end extreme poverty twenty-six times over. The average member of the top 1% holds 8,251 times the wealth of someone in the bottom half. ↩