Forget Billionaire Lists: Elon Musk Is Worth More Than $1 Trillion After the SpaceX IPO

• SpaceX's pop on its trading debut drove Elon Musk's net worth, at least on paper, to over $1 trillion.

• Yesterday's billionaire has 4.76 billion shares in SpaceX, about an 11% stake in Tesla, and smaller investments in his other startups Neuralink and The Boring Company.

Yesterday's billionaire is today's trillionaire. You can thank SpaceX for that.

SpaceX's (SPCX) IPO, which priced at $135 per share, boosted the value of founder and chief Elon Musk's assets, which according to company filings include 4.76 billion shares of the company. By Forbes' estimate, his net worth rose by approximately $1.88 billion overnight to $982 billion. With the stock finishing today around $161, Musk is the world's first trillionaire -- on paper, at least. Forbes' real-time tracker has him at $1.1 trillion.

Musk also owns about 11% of Tesla (TSLA), which also rose today and sports a market cap above $1.5 trillion. And he has stakes in two other businesses he founded: brain interface company Neuralink, and The Boring Company, a tunneling startup.

WHY THIS MATTERS TO YOU

Musk's outsize ambitions to deliver humanoid robotics, build data centers in space, and colonize Mars make his net worth important because it puts a number on his power and influence.

SpaceX accounts for the largest chunk of Musk's net worth, or over 70% as of June 11, according to Bloomberg's Billionaires Index. Tesla represents a more modest 17%, the firm's data show.

The estimated net worth of the second- and third-wealthiest people comes in far below Musk's: Google (GOOGL) co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are valued at around $294 billion and $271 billion, respectively, according to Forbes.

You'd need to combine the assets of the second through the fifth wealthiest to get to just over $1 trillion: In other words, you'd need two Google founders, a Jeff Bezos, and a Larry Ellison to get to Musk-level riches. (That's Amazon's (AMZN) Bezos and Oracle's (ORCL) Ellison, to be clear.)

Ellison, lifted by the value of his stake in Oracle, last year briefly could say he was richer than Musk. But if Musk unlocks milestone-linked rewards in his trillion-dollar pay package at Tesla, the gulf between his dollars and everyone else's is likely to grow even wider.

This article has been updated since it was first published to reflect the close of trading.

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