Musk close to a trillion with Spacex

Elon Musk he is one step away from a goal that until a few years ago belonged more to science fiction than to finance: becoming the first trillionaire in history. The owner of SpaceX, Tesla and xAI will exceed the threshold of 1 trillion dollars of assets thanks to the listing of his space company on the stock exchange, the largest initial public offering ever made, with approx 75 billion dollars collected. SpaceX has set the placement price at $135 per sharefor a capitalization of approximately 1,800 billion dollarswell above the 29 billion raised by Saudi Aramco in 2019.

According to the calculations of Forbes the operation has already increased Musk’s assets by approximately 188 billiona 982 billion dollars: if Tesla remains unchanged and SpaceX stock rises to $138.50 when trading begins, Musk will become the first trillionaire in history. Furthermore, an enormous distance will separate him from the other scrooges on the planet. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, respectively the second and third richest men in the world with $257 billion and $237 billion, are together worth less than half of what Musk could achieve after SpaceX’s debut.

But what does a trillion dollars actually represent? This is a figure close to the entire wealth produced in a year by a country like Poland, whose GDP in 2025 was around 1,040 billion dollars according to the International Monetary Fund, and is equivalent to around three times the value of the gold reserves of the Bank of France.

Unlike gold, however, Musk’s fortune depends on the performance of the securities he owns and is therefore largely virtual until he decides to sell them. “If Elon Musk wanted to sell a very large portion of his shares, the value of those shares would collapse,” he explains Alexandre Baradez, head of market analysis at IG France, “and his overall fortune would also automatically decline.” A massive sale, the analyst adds to AFP, would send a very strong signal to the market and other investors could interpret it as a loss of confidence in the companies’ prospects and sell in turn, triggering a further decline in prices.

The vision beyond the rockets

Around SpaceX revolves around a vision that goes far beyond the rocket business: the company promises to build a colony of a million people on Mars, create other human settlements in space, put data centers the size of football fields into orbit and compete with OpenAI, Alphabet and Anthropic in the artificial intelligence sector, goals that require enormous investments.

The bet on Elon Musk

The investors’ bet is largely a bet on the same Elon Musk to shuffle the cards on the table again. Born in Pretoria, South Africa, to a Canadian mother and a South African father, who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997, Musk built his first fortune with the sale of Zip2 and PayPal, operations that brought him around $200 million. With that capital he founded SpaceX and invested in Tesla, defying the skepticism of those who believed it was impossible to make both reusable rockets and electric cars profitable.

Tesla, writes the Wall Street Journal, has become the car company with the highest value in the world and, according to many observers, it has accelerated the transition of the entire industry towards electric. Since its debut on the Nasdaq in 2010, the stock has followed a similar path to what could await SpaceX: it jumped 40% on the first day of trading, slipped below the placement price in the following days, then in the following years created extraordinary returns for those who held the securities in their portfolio. Whoever invested a thousand dollars at Tesla’s IPO today finds himself with a share worth around 352,000 dollars.

“Muskonomy” ed “Elon premium”

Musk then expanded his influence with the acquisition of Twitter in 2022, transformed into X, and his empire also includes Neuralink and The Boring Company. An ecosystem so extensive that some observers have coined the term “Muskonomy” to describe it, while in the markets we increasingly talk about “Elon premium“, an assessment that reflects not only economic results and industrial prospects but also confidence in Musk’s ability to turn extremely ambitious projects into reality.

However, there is no shortage of criticism. Tesla has faced legal disputes and tensions with shareholders, especially over the huge compensation package awarded to Musk in 2018, and several institutional investors have contested some aspects of SpaceX’s listing, including the shares with enhanced voting rights and the control that the founder will continue to exercise over the company.

Detractors accuse the entrepreneur of concentrating too much economic, technological and media power in the hands of a single person, while supporters instead see the entrepreneur as the man who revolutionized the electric car, access to space and the satellite industry. However you judge it, the listing of SpaceX marks a new chapter in the history of global finance and brings Elon Musk to the threshold of a figure that until now had only existed in the record books: one trillion dollars.