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Elon Musk net worth estimated at $1.1 trillion
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- Title
- SpaceX opens 11% higher at $150 a share and makes Musk the first trillionaire
- Published
- Jun 12 2026
- Word count
- 269 words
I'm reminded of this story/poem by Kurt Vonnegut, originally from The New Yorker:
The difference between your three-year-old child and a millionaire is now the same as the difference between that millionaire and Elon Musk.
Except in maturity level. Then they're roughly equivalent.
First trillionaire that we know of… I still contend that the truly richest people on the planet have made absolutely certain that nobody knows they exist. Why paint a target on your back?
Not exactly how it works.
Private Equity is a thing, but at the same time this always comes back to "they're only rich on paper". Musk is one of the richest people on the planet, but it's not like he can actually cash out for 1 trillion (just a couple hundred billion which is still insane, but you get my point).
Thing is to be worth that much this way it pretty much MUST be public.
However, at some point you have to ask what is money for and who could possible have more, and the answer to that is mostly state leaders. Putin/Xi/Trump are the obvious examples of people can, (and for debatable amounts do), use their countries GDP as a slush fund.
Musk can offer someone $750b in China for land, and they can tell him no and he could never come up with that anyways. Xi can have that tomorrow by nodding at the right person AND could probably have the money in their account as well if he felt so inclined.
Again though, we know these people exist. You can't move that level of money without being readily identifiable. You might not be rage posting on twitter and Nazi Saluting at the inauguration, but you can't "illuminati" trillions of dollars.
If anything, being able to take loans on stock is worse because then they also get to avoid paying any taxes...because the "gains weren't realized."
This is why we need wealth/asset taxes.
The only reason that’s a problem is because of the step-up basis on death.
That, and then you also have to wait a generation.
That’s not really an issue. When you have assets that are unrealized, it is the exact opposite of “a dragon on its hoard of gold”. An unrealized asset is money at work. When you realize it, is when that money returns to you, back to the hoard and out of the economy.
If you buy a bond or a stock, that’s money you no longer have, that is being spent (hopefully on something productive). Buying bonds or stocks or any other investment is taking money from the hoard and putting it in the economy.
A gold horde doesn't do anything harmful if it isn't spent. That seems neutral. The question is whether what billionaires (or anyone else) does by investing is better or worse than hoarding it.
Rather than saying investment is good on average and leaving it at that, I think we need to make distinctions. Some Investments are better than others.
Unrealized gains are more limited than unrestricted personal funds, but they can still be a form of power. In the form of company stock, it's one way that company founders can control what those companies do and what projects they undertake.
Musk is a pretty good example of that. Yes, some of the projects he decided to invest in seem well worth doing. Others were pretty clearly harmful.
I shared an interview arguing that founder control is often good, or at least better than alternatives like private equity or leveraged buyouts.
And Musk has been on both sides of that, with the Twitter takeover changing it from mediocre to considerably worse. Also, how did he finance it? Partially with bank loans.
In the end, I think governance of huge budgets or huge investment funds is a tough problem no matter what. I find the rush to build data centers as quickly as possible somewhat mystifying. But it's not like Congress is doing a good job of spending money either.
I would argue it does from the perspective of a society. Money is the abstraction of resources. To have a bunch in a non-invested state means that there are resources that are not doing anything to the benefit of society. It’s effectively resources that belong to society, inasmuch as a the dragon is part of said society, but is effectively invisible to society.
Opportunity cost is as real as a real cost. Someone deciding to keep $10,000 as cash vs investing it in municipal bonds to build a new school has a cost - it’s the new school that isn’t built.
This can even happen with individuals. Japan famously had a liquidity trap where people saved too much of their money, which was directly detrimental to their economy post-bubble.
The tricky thing about opportunity costs is that they depend on counterfactuals: what would have happened otherwise? It's speculative, like imagining the future.
When we buy food at a grocery store then we get to control who eats it, but when we don't, we don't normally worry that it will go to waste, because we imagine someone else might buy it. That might not be true! Maybe it's in the half-off bin and they'll throw it out tomorrow. We don't know enough to accurately predict how much waste will happen.
Similarly, choosing not to buy muni bonds doesn't normally mean that government projects go unfunded, unless nobody else would do it.
As I understand it, a liquidity trap is what happens when saving money doesn't do anything because businesses don't take out loans because they don't see profitable investment opportunities, because consumers aren't spending. It seems like this shows another way that the consequences of investment are situational. More bank deposits might sometimes result in more investment, but not in that situation. To understand the consequences, we need to know what the banks are doing and what consumers are doing.
So I don't think modeling unspent money as corresponding to unused real-world resources works very well. I think it's more like not voting. A bank account or investing in an index fund is not quite like sitting out entirely, but it's still very passive, allowing the market or bankers to control the actual investment decisions.
To make a stronger argument for not hoarding, how about if we compare with giving money to charity? There are charities that could scale up and poor people who have immediate spending needs.
It's actually not possible to take loans against your portfolio in Europe, for reasons related to this. It is basically considered "tax avoidance".
I have no opinion formed about it, but it is interesting difference against US.
This is not true. Perhaps you meant to talk about a particular country in Europe? There's huge differences in the financial instruments available in different European countries and their fiscal treatment, but I know for a fact of several countries where pledging assets is a perfectly acceptable mechanism to gain access to loans at favourable interest rates.
Looks like you're right! Thanks for correction.
It is called "Lombard loans" sometimes.
Wealth taxes are somewhat difficult to implement because wealth can move. Two of the primary reasons wealthy individuals choose to keep their assets within the United States is because of tax and inheritance legislation, especially the step-up in basis that @stu2b50 mentions. The United States does have tax havens. Plenty of individuals live and spend their wealth elsewhere while keeping the actual assets within the country.
Aggressive taxation on assets in the States could push people with resources to move that money to other countries. That would hurt the geopolitical power of the United States as those assets would become much more difficult to keep subjected to U.S. law.
And that's why expatriation taxes exist.
More jokingly: Then mission accomplished. They can take their asses and assets and become somebody else's problem.
Also, that threat is often really overblown. Rich people threatened to decamp from NYC if Mamdani was elected, and no such thing occurred. They're always whining about how they'll have to take their money and go live on a deserted island or something but they never actually do because they happen to like living in a society. All the money in the world doesn't do anything if there's no one around to be impressed by it.
That's also not really how either of those work, but i've been over this before.
I was referring to this, wrt the loans.
https://smartasset.com/investing/buy-borrow-die-how-the-rich-avoid-taxes
And best I can tell, we don't currently have any sort of wealth tax outside of estate taxation. We need something that clamps down on existing inequality, not just keeps it from getting worse.
I'm aware of what you're referring to, and the "die" part is a key portion of this playbook. Believe it or not, Banks don't want to just be stiffed for a $1.2b loan on a collateral of $500b.
Yes there's a loophole here that works out very roughly to where a group is basically agreeing that overinflated asset A justifies loan B, so asset owner gets their loan and the bank gets their monthly payments on the loan, and the government doesn't get taxes unless asset A is actually sold.
The owner of the asset actually needs to make loan payments though. You could try paying loans with other loans but while the wealthy can do that better than the average person, it's more of a stalling tactic than a long term solution. Banks WILL take their money, and often these loans are backed with the asset as collateral, in which case there's some other interesting situations.
It is 100% a loophole how it's used at the top levels, and parts of it haven't been tested heavily and could lead to major down the road problems (if TSLA just dumps tomorrow there's a lot that kinda goes with it, and we see how realistic it is for creditors to actually get value out of an over inflated stock).
All of this has absolutely nothing to do with what most people mean when they say wealth taxes, other than "well i want rich people to pay more tax".
You would be far better off fixing the loopholes than you would attempting a wealth tax. There's plenty of evidence out there of just how poorly almost ever attempt at a wealth tax has performed, and how completely illogical most propositions are from a fundamental "math, economics, and laws do not work that way" level.
So if you're using wealth tax as shorthand for "these people need to pay more tax, by whatever means work" sure I agree.
If you actually mean some plan to try and value an asset and then pay yearly tax on it when the asset hasn't actually generated any real revenue, sorry but it's mostly a fairy tale that distracts from real solutions. The people you think it will hurt likely won't be, and the people you want to help will take most of the damage, and it's not because "evil people stop it" so much as you're wasting your time proposing things only slightly more believable than perpetual motion, and like perpetual motion, it distracts from lots of very real, doable, and proven solutions.
Edit-
In fact if you read the book/study that your link references, you'll see the author doesn't propose a Wealth Tax either, but a tax on spending. This interview is a nice summary:
https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/555607in.html
Not entirely related, but I wonder how much monetary value you could assign to having dictatorial power of a country? Someone like Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman may "only" be worth 25 billion; but his true spending power is in the trillions if you count the wealth that he controls via his position.
It's probably purely academic at that point because when you reach that level of wealth the differences become basically meaningless, but I imagine pure purchasing power would heavily favor a ruler over someone who's net worth is basically all in stocks.
Yeah you kinda get to a spot where “you and what army” is the measure.
What are you “buying” for 25 billion? Not many things have that kind if value nor could you spend it all in one go (space and nuclear power are example markets where it could happen ).
Some massive Louisiana purchase style thing is extremely unlikely in the modern era, and given that money is mostly an abstraction of work and sway in a specific economy, you obviously run into the edges at that level of wealth.
It’s kind of the other problem with things like “Musk is stealing everyone’s money to be a trillionaire ” because while absolutely some truth in it, it’s really closer to just pretending there’s more money, not that there actually is.
No one is saying no to Musk/Bezos/Gates because they can’t afford it, so if you suddenly say “well that trillion could’ve gone to X” well…oddly not really because it basically doesn’t exist. It’s only so high because everyone agrees it doesn’t exist and is gambling on if it will eventually exist.
If you were to try and pay payroll or buy food or basically convert the value of the stock into something tangible then it plummets. That’s a huge part of the problem even discussing this because people treat it like it’s money in a budget or a bank account going somewhere else and it’s just not.
It’s a lot more accurate to treat these things as if you got a rigged appraisal on a house or collectible card or something. You can point to that number and maybe even get loans off it, but if you go to sell it suddenly the market determines what it’s worth.
So ultimately the most valuable commodity in the world is the means to produce or the means to seize. Money is just an abstraction of that and countries don’t need to deal in abstractions when they don’t want to.
I think my skepticism stems from the fact that I’ve known some incredibly wealthy people who lived even more frugally than my poor ass did. The millionaire next-door and that sort of thing.
Personally, I think that wealth should be measured in strictly liquid assets. How much money can you get to right this second? If that were the measure then I’m not even sure we’ve passed the first true liquid billionaire yet. In the private sector anyway. I’m sure that heads of state could absolutely get ahold of that kind of money.
Are these people the problem? If they have nice houses, yachts, cars, parties, food, travel, whatever, a tax on spending would capture that.
There’s plenty of other solutions as well that aren’t wealth tax or spending tax.
I’m not sure people are actively campaigning for a wealth tax because they’re worried about some dragon horde billionaire (buffet is the closest I can think of) who only wants to see the number go up and lives in a shack
From what I can tell, it maybe used to be the case that guys like Putin were worth the most, but perhaps that's not true anymore with the insane net worths we're seeing now.
And he still has to lie about his video game skills and has no friends.
Sure. Sounds great.
I know that I will never see that kind of money, but I sleep soundly knowing that all of my gaming achievements and skills are my own and that I have people around me that I can call friends. (Along with the fact that I never chased a invitation to be associated with a human trafficker and that said trafficker kept cancelling on him).
You know when one person gets too far ahead in monopoly and everyone else is just sitting around thinking 'thank god this game is ending soon'?
That's because Monopoly lacks the rules that make other players get into unlimited debt and be reduced to slaves. Now imagine players must keep playing indefinitely and when they run out of all money they just go into debt and start paying with human dignity.
Let's hope some of the other players will flip the board and go outside to play with a ball or something.
Same. But first, I want to play Hungry Hungry Hippos
Is it?
The board game Monopoly always ends eventually, the rules make it inevitable.
For most people, numbers start to get fake once they pass a certain threshold, so you might as well be saying a bajillion/zillion/gorillion. One of my favorite ways to contextualize a billion vs a million is in seconds. A million seconds is about 12 days, a billion seconds is about 32 years. I didn't know what a trillion seconds was until today. About 31,710 years.
Far be it from me to side with the accelerationists, but I, for one, welcome this unimaginable personal wealth. For every billion dollars this drugged out, robo-dicked, cringe posting on main, narcissistic fucking loser adds to his net worth, a few more people get excited about wealth redistribution, degrowth, or the return of the guillotine.
I think you touched on a point I was just thinking about while reading this. At what point does he have so much "wealth" that it becomes a no issue of sorts. So we can barely fathom a trillion so at some point its just an abstract amount that actually has no meaning and then has no value in our world.
This is way too deep for 8am
Headline was wrong so I corrected it. SpaceX market cap is above 2 trillion. Musk owns 42% of that.
On paper, for now, but we’ll see where it ends up. He certainly couldn’t sell all the shares.
Matt Levine wrote yesterday that a 20% pop would be just about ideal for an IPO:
19.22% End of day! I'd say that went pretty well for them today, better than I expected.
As much I believe in and support SpaceX I stayed away from this IPO as I don't buy this data center in space bullshit and the valuation is just way, way too high.
Weird. When I posted, it said he was worth $2T. I guess I'm slightly less upset given that he didn't become the first trillionaire AND reach $2T...but we're talking shades of black here.
As of right now up 28%, we will see how the day ends.
One of the great failures of human economic thinking is failing to appreciate the concept of liquidity. Unfortunately, having large amounts of illiquid and questionably-valued wealth confers real benefits that make it easier to amass more wealth.
Elon Musk has made me think about leadership as a concept a lot lately.
He's one of the most controversial business leaders of the past 50 years, with lots of people canonizing him as a radical, innovative genius, and a lot of others categorizing him as a lucky, delusional nepo baby without much talent.
It's made me think about the idea of whether the leader of an organization is responsible for its success, and compare it to leadership experiences in my own life.
I think the common conception of leadership is a little flawed. We tend to ascribe all of an organization's successes and all of its failures to its leader. There's some truth to that, but I don't feel like its all of the truth.
It is true, in almost every situation, that the leader of an organization has more influence on that organization than any single other person. I don't agree however, that they have more influence than all of the other people in the organization.
I've seen great leaders fail because of terrible organizations, and terrible leaders succeed because of great organizations.
I've been both that terrible and great leader myself I think.
A lot has been said about Elon main strength being his hype generation/reality distortion bubble a la Steve Jobs, and I agree that much of his success is owed to that. The discussion around that ability focuses on the demand side though; he drums up excitement by investors and consumers by talking about incredible, moonshot sci Fi ideas, and despite always coming up short and not being able to deliver on them, he manages to continue to sell these ideas. He doesn't just sell it to people buying his products and shares of his companies though. He also sells it to prospective employees.
I actually interviewed for SpaceX a few years ago for a technical role relating to Starlink. I was working at a large bank, making pretty decent money, fully remote, but I wanted to move on because it was getting pretty stagnant. There was at least four rounds of interviews, and a take home assignment that was pretty in depth architecture work. It took me about 8 hours, and I was quite confident in the solution; I'd been doing network architecture for years, and what they were asking was complex, but nothing too daunting for me.
They told me that 1. They didn't like my solution 2. They would not be telling me why they didn't like it, and 3. Baffingly, they wanted to continue to interview me.
The next round would have been an in person, 3 day long interview in LA.
Between that, the fact that when I asked about Elon (this was right at the beginning of his "dark maga" stuff), they deified the guy, and the fact that they were actually offering less than I was making at the time for a 100% in person job, in LA, I told them to forget it.
It made me think though, there probably are quite a few people with a similar skill level as me that are willing to do that job for the chance to say they work with rockets at SpaceX. It's kind of a nerds dream job.
It's not surprising that Elon has been able to use this strategy to underpay for world class talent, just like he's able to overcharge for subpar products. It's a massive leg up when it comes to building a successful company.
If Elon's only real skills are this marketing ability (and they very well may be), it still means he has a company run by some of the best people in the world who he doesn't have to pay that much. It's hard to fail when you have that foundation. His leadership ability, vision, strategy, or whatever else a CEO is supposed to have doesn't really matter. His strong talent base will continually save him.
Would be interested to know what the figure would be without govt loans, sketchy tax avoidance etc
Target painted, now we wait 🤷🏻♀️
SpaceX stock jumps for second day, now up over 40% since debut
A funny thing about the stock market is that most prices have to be wrong (a company's true value cannot be that volatile), but it's hard to say what the right price is or when it will be reached.
Wouldn't it be more accurate to say they're either always correct or there is no such thing as a wrong price because it's just a reflection of what people are willing to pay?
That depends on whether you believe prices ought to have something to do with future cash flows.
But when there's no consensus on this, maybe it's more chaotic.