Elon Musk reached another significant milestone on Wednesday, becoming the first-ever half-a-trillion-dollar person. According to the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires tracker, the richest individual on the planet is currently worth $500 billion, as announced at 3:30 pm Eastern.
Musk, already worth more than $400 billion and thus the first person to reach that milestone in December, is now worth $150 billion more than his closest competitor, Larry Ellison, and is halfway to becoming the first trillionaire in the world.
The stock price of the EV maker has almost doubled since Musk initially explained on the April earnings call that he would be resigning his position in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) of President Trump to dedicate more time to Tesla.
Tesla is now valued at $191 billion, as the company’s market capitalization has bounced back within 10 percent of all-time highs that the company reached in December, with Musk holding 12 percent ownership in Tesla.
And that does not include performance-related Tesla stock options as part of the 2018 CEO compensation package that Musk received, which had a valuation of $133 billion today, had the award not been revoked by a Delaware judge in January 2024. Those options have been discounted by 50 percent by Forbes pending the decision on whether Musk will appeal the ruling to the Delaware Supreme Court or not.
However, the Tesla board suggested a new, record-breaking compensation package in September that would make Musk’s additional stock worth up to $1 trillion (before taxes and the cost of unlocking the restricted shares) in case Tesla meets “Mars-shot” performance targets such as increasing its market capitalization more than eight times over the 10-year lifespan of the compensation.
Tesla is not the sole company that Musk needs to credit with his half-trillion-dollar wealth. His rocket company, SpaceX, which he co-founded in 2002, was valued at a private tender in August at $400 billion, compared to $350 billion in December. Musk has an estimated ownership of 42 percent of SpaceX, which was valued at $168 billion.
And lastly, there is xAI Holdings, which Musk did in March 2022 when he jointly acquired his new artificial intelligence company xAI with the social media company he had acquired in 2022, X (formerly Twitter), in a deal that valued the new company to the tune of $113 billion.
Musk is a shareholder of approximately 53 percent of xAI Holding with a value of $60 billion. This is only the most recent of the milestones that Musk has hit within the last half-decade in terms of reaching the goal of having a net worth of $500 billion.
Soaring Tesla shares made Musk the fifth person in history to be valued at $100 billion in August 2020, up from about $24.6 billion in March 2020. He was the first person to reach the position of the richest in the world with a net worth of almost $190 billion in January 2021.
Later in September 2021, he became the third individual, after Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and LVMH’s Bernard Arnault, to have an estimated net worth over $200 billion.
Musk reached a valuation of $300 billion in November 2021, and his valuation was $400 billion in December 2024. Meanwhile, Musk has the potential to be the first trillionaire in the world, ahead of March 2033 when the first of his two-vesting dates on his $1 trillion Tesla compensation package vests. Thus, as per Musk, the award wasn’t about just the money.
In one of his September X (formerly known as Twitter) posts, Musk wrote: “It’s not about ‘compensation’, but about me having enough influence over Tesla to ensure safety if we build millions of robots. If I can just get kicked out in the future by activist shareholder advisory firms who don’t even own Tesla shares themselves, I’m not comfortable with that future.”
