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15-06-2026
AUSTIN: When Elon Musk’s SpaceX debuts on Wall Street on Friday, the controversial tech titan will almost certainly step into the history books as the world’s first trillionaire.
Musk already holds the crown of the world’s wealthiest man worth roughly $696bn before SpaceX announced its record-breaking initial public offering on Thursday, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index but his 42 percent stake in the rocket-cum-AI company will take him into uncharted territory.
SpaceX will begin trading at a valuation of $1.77tn when it debuts on the NASDAQ stock exchange, selling 555.6 million shares at $135 each.
Estimates of the value of Musk’s stake range from $743bn to $866.5bn.
If all goes well, Musk, who also leads Tesla, will officially cement his trillionaire status before markets close on Friday.
$1 trillion is a number so large that it stretches the limits of human comprehension.
If Musk spent $1m every day, it would still take him 2,740 years to spend $1 trillion, according to UK charity Oxfam.
Ranked alongside his peers, Musk will be more than three times richer than Google co-founder Larry Page, who is the world’s second-richest man, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with a fortune of $304bn.
Musk will also rank among the wealthiest people of all time.
While comparing wealth across history is difficult due to differences in purchasing power and standards of living, Musk is on track to command a greater share of the US economy than the 19th-century magnates who ushered in the industrial age.
John Jacob Astor, who is widely regarded as the first American multimillionaire and an archetype of the self-made tycoon, was worth between $20m and $30m, or roughly 1 percent of US GDP, when he died in 1848, according to the MeasuringWorth Foundation, a non-profit that provides estimates of value for economic historians.
A few decades later, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie amassed a fortune of about $380m, a figure equivalent to about 0.5 percent of US GDP at the time of his death in 1919.
Oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller was worth around 1.5 percent of US GDP when he died in 1937 with a fortune of $1.4bn, according to the MeasuringWorth Foundation
As a trillionaire, Musk would be worth roughly 3 percent of US GDP.
Guido Alfani, a professor of economic history at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy, said another way to compare the wealth of Musk and his predecessors is to consider the amount of human labor that could be purchased with their respective fortunes.
“If we do this, we can surely conclude that Elon Musk might be the wealthiest person who has ever lived excluding emperors or other rulers whose wealth is not easily distinguishable from that of the state,” Alfani told media.
Alfani estimated that Musk could have commanded the work of 557,800 people in 2025, versus 116,000 by Rockefeller in 1937 or 48,000 by Carnegie in 1901.
Much as Musk is a polarizing figure today, the tycoons that accumulated vast fortunes during the mid-to-late 1800s were controversial figures in their day.
‘Rich beyond anything seen before’
Astor was known as one of New York City’s largest and most unscrupulous landlords. Carnegie, Rockefeller and their contemporaries during what became known as the Gilded Age were dubbed “Robber Barons” for their ruthless and anti-competitive business practices.
Much like Musk, the industrialists of the Gilded Age were rich beyond anything Americans had seen before, said Richard Wright, professor of history emeritus at Stanford University. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
