Elon Musk stopped being a trillionaire on Monday, and the reason says more about the AI trade than about the richest man alive. His fortune slipped to $879.3 billion after another pullback in SpaceX shares stripped $37.9 billion from his wealth in a single session — with a later reading closer to $871.6 billion as the sell-off deepened. The peak was $1.45 trillion, reached on 16 June when SpaceX shares touched an all-time high above $225. Four weeks and more than half a trillion dollars later, the world's first almost-instant multitrillionaire is merely, spectacularly, rich.The cause is singular, and it sits outside Musk himself. SpaceX shares slid to just under $140, closing on the $135 price at which the company went public a month ago, a decline of more than 38 per cent from the high it touched the day after listing. The rocket that carried Musk past every wealth record in history is doing what rockets do once the burn ends — falling back toward the pad it launched from. The force pulling it down is a market that has switched from paying for AI promises to demanding AI profits, and that same force has already halved Larry Ellison and dropped him from second-richest to eighth in a matter of weeks.About The AuthorAt heart, I am a storyteller drawn to the watershed moments that bend the technology landscape. I braid narrative with data, humanise statistics, and trace the arc from first spark to world-changing impact. My reportage, features and reviews are witty, sardonic, visual and vivid, using anecdote to illuminate rather than eviscerate.