Elon Musk is the world’s first trillionaire (on paper) thanks to the SpaceX IPO

Welcome to history’s first trillionaire. Sort of.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX, a rocket, satellite internet and artificial intelligence company that’s bleeding cash and has puny sales compared to established technology giants, announced Thursday the price for its initial public offering of $135 per share. The step sets up a blockbuster IPO that ranks as the largest in history, at about $75 billion.

Musk was already the richest person in the world, according to lists from Bloomberg and Forbes. He’s also in line to receive a trillion-dollar pay package if he hits certain milestones at the automaker Tesla. But the SpaceX IPO pushes him into trillionaire status, depending on how you count his wealth.

According to SpaceX’s disclosures, Musk holds roughly half of the company’s stock, including shares that he might earn far in the future tied to accomplishments such as shooting computer data centers into space and creating a human settlement on Mars. Those Musk shares in SpaceX are worth about $867 billion at Thursday’s IPO price.

Combined with the chunk of the automaker Tesla that also belongs to Musk, his stock in the two companies is valued at more than $1.1 trillion combined, according to Washington Post calculations from SpaceX and Tesla securities filings.

As with nearly everything about Musk, his trillionaire status requires explanation. SpaceX has granted big slugs of company stock that only pay off if he drives his company’s value to monumental heights and if SpaceX achieves Musk’s goal of establishing a populated human colony on Mars. Excluding those shares, Musk is just shy of trillionaire status, for now.

But based on SpaceX’s report of Musk’s holdings, the value of his Tesla and SpaceX stock holdings are more than 10 times the net worth of Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Musk is now worth about as much as the world’s next four richest people combined: Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin; Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and executive chairman who also owns The Post; and Larry Ellison, founder of business software titan Oracle.

SpaceX disclosed substantial losses in the run-up to the IPO, including $13 billion since the beginning of 2023, primarily driven by artificial intelligence bets. Most of Musk’s compensation from his companies do not derive from a traditional salary. Instead, he is paid through stock packages tied to ambitious goals, such as delivering 1 million humanoid robots at Tesla, that can far surpass what comparable executives make.

SpaceX’s stock will be available Friday for members of the public to freely buy and sell. If SpaceX’s stock price goes up to $140 on Friday, Musk will be a paper trillionaire even excluding the stock tied to Mars and space data centers. (Source: The Washington Post)