E lon Musk just became the first trillionaire in world history. SpaceX’s stock began trading on the Nasdaq Friday at $150 per share, implying a nearly $2 trillion market cap for the company. Forbes estimates that Musk is now worth $1.1 trillion as of just before noon eastern Friday, up from $982 billion on Thursday, when SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 share. The IPO pricing boosted Musk’s fortune by $188 billion yesterday, according to Forbes’ calculations. Musk, who serves as chairman, CEO and chief technical officer of SpaceX, owns 4.8 billion shares of the rocketmaker, worth $715 billion. He has another 350 million stock options with an exercise price of $8.40 per share, worth $50 billion, giving him a 38% stake in the company, worth $765 billion. Before SpaceX priced its IPO on Thursday, Forbes had been valuing Musk’s estimated 40% stake (before dilution from the offering) at around $500 billion, based on the $1.25 trillion valuation of SpaceX’s merger with Musk’s artificial intelligence and social media company xAI in February. (xAI previously merged with X–formerly Twitter–in March 2025.) Musk also owns just over 10% of $1.5 trillion (market cap) Tesla, worth $163 billion, plus options to acquire another nearly 8% stake, worth $113 billion. Rounding out his net worth are smaller stakes in his brain interface startup Neuralink and his tunneling firm Boring Company, plus several billion dollars’ of wealth from previous Tesla share sales. Not included in Forbes’ estimate of Musk’s net worth: performance-based restricted shares that could boost his stakes in SpaceX and Tesla to 47% and 29%, respectively (before taxes and the cost of unlocking the restricted shares). To earn all that stock, Musk will have to achieve lofty goals like growing SpaceX and Tesla’s market caps to $7.5 trillion and $8.5 trillion, respectively, and establishing a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants. The idea of anyone becoming a trillionaire seemed unfathomable even just a couple years ago. Bill Gates became the first person worth $100 billion in 1999, but that didn’t last long as the dotcom bubble soon burst. The 12-figure threshold wasn’t crossed again until 2017, when Jeff Bezos became the second ever centibillionaire. Bezos, who also was the first person to hit the $200 billion mark (in 2020), now ranks as the world’s fourth richest person, worth an estimated $247 billion. Gates, meanwhile, ranks No. 20, with a $104 billion fortune. The world’s second richest person is Larry Page, who is worth $296 billion—or less than one-third as much as Musk. Larry Ellison, who currently ranks No. 5 with a net worth of $229 billion, is the only person other than Musk who has ever been worth $400 billion. Musk has been building toward this record for more than a quarter century. He founded SpaceX in 2002, the same year eBay paid $1.5 billion for PayPal, which had merged with an online bank cofounded by Musk called X.com in 2000. Musk then joined Tesla as an investor and chairman in 2004, a year after the company’s founding, and was later granted the title of cofounder. He took over as CEO of Tesla in 2008, the same year SpaceX launched the first privately developed rocket into orbit. Tesla went public on the Nasdaq in 2010, and Musk debuted on Forbes’ annual World’s Billionaires list two years later, with an estimated $2 billion fortune, making him the 634th richest person in the world.From there, Musk climbed the billionaire ranks at breakneck speed, taking just nine years to become the planet’s wealthiest person for the first time in January 2021, as Tesla’s shares soared by nearly 13,000%, propelling Musk past Bezos for the No. 1 spot. Then, after Musk and Bezos spent much of the year trading places, another spike in Tesla’s stock briefly made Musk the first person ever worth $300 billion in November 2021, before he quickly sent shares spiraling by unloading nearly $40 billion of his Tesla holdings to cover taxes on expiring stock options and to help fund his $44 billion hostile takeover of Twitter announced in April 2022. Musk ceded the top spot to Frenchman Bernard Arnault of luxury goods giant LVMH in December 2022, and the duo traded the title for much of 2023 and the first half of 2024, as Musk’s wealth wobbled along with Tesla’s rocky stock price. Musk retook the crown for good in June 2024, and quickly sped off with it, achieving in short order a number of net worth milestones that were previously unthinkable. He became the first person ever worth $400 billion in December 2024, $500 billion in October, $600 billion and $700 billion in September, and $800 billion in February. A rebound in Tesla’s stock price, which hit an all-time high in December, and a ruling by the Delaware Supreme Court that restored a huge set of voided Tesla stock options (now worth $113 billion), have contributed to these milestones. But it’s the soaring valuation of SpaceX–now Musk’s most valuable asset by far–that has played the biggest role in Musk’s meteoric rise. SpaceX has boosted its valuation nearly twentyfold since 2021, when it first crossed the $100 billion mark in a private secondary transaction. That’s despite the fact that the company reported a net loss of $4.9 billion on $18.7 billion of revenue in 2025. SpaceX expects to draw in public shareholders with its fast-growing Starlink satellite network and its ambitious plans to colonize mars and to build solar-powered data centers for AI in space.While many have questioned the fundamentals underlying SpaceX‘s sky high valuation, Musk and many of his biggest backers see it as a steal. “We think it’s going to be worth $10 trillion, $20 trillion, or $30 trillion,” said billionaire investor Ron Baron of Baron Capital in a video interview posted to X this month. “And people in the company think I’m low balling it.”Musk’s comment on the video: “Ron is smart.”More from ForbesForbesFrom Rockefeller To Musk: The Wealth Boom That’s Leading To The First TrillionaireBy Chase Peterson-WithornForbesForbes 250: America’s Most Successful Living ImmigrantsBy Alex KnappForbesAmerica Doesn’t Work Without Immigrants—Here’s WhyBy Giacomo TogniniForbesThe Highest-Paid Players At The 2026 World CupBy Brett KnightForbesSpaceX Left California. Its IPO Payday Did Not.By Alan Ohnsman