Elon Musk

01Overview

02Reconcile the Estimate

Every holding in our $1,014.9 billion figure and where its number comes from. The SpaceX and Tesla share counts are from SEC filings and are valued at the October 16, 2026 closes; the private-company stakes are our estimates. No debt is subtracted, because no loan balance has been disclosed. We include the 286,428,773 restricted Tesla shares because they are issued to him, carry his votes and have no performance condition left; he would forfeit them only if he left Tesla before January 19, 2028; the low end of our range is the figure without them.

Prices: SPCX $146.03 and TSLA $354.72, October 16, 2026 closes. SpaceX holdings at June 30, 2026 and Tesla holdings at September 30, 2026, the latest filed; EDGAR shows no later Musk filing that changes them. No discount for the SpaceX lockup, which runs to about June 12, 2027.

Not observable: Personal debt. Tesla's 2026 proxy says 207,498,721 of his Tesla shares (about $73.6 billion at $354.72) are pledged as collateral for personal indebtedness³, but the loan balance is not disclosed, so nothing is subtracted. Also not observable: his cash, his exact Neuralink and Boring Company stakes, and any tax he would owe on selling shares or exercising options.

03Wealth History

Forbes: Apr 4, 2023 $180B; Apr 2, 2024 $195B; Apr 1, 2025 $342B; Mar 10, 2026 $839B; Oct 18, 2026 $908.5B. DaveManuel.com: Oct 19, 2026 $1,014.9B.

Forbes: World's Billionaires lists published April 4, 2023, April 2, 2024, April 1, 2025 and March 10, 2026; the last point is its real-time figure of October 18, 2026, not a list; as published; not inflation-adjusted. DaveManuel.com: this page's estimate.

04Published Estimates

Our number is about $106 billion above Forbes. Most of the gap is one decision: in June 2026 Musk exercised his 2018 Tesla options and received 286,428,773 restricted shares that do not vest until January 19, 2028. We count those shares (worth $101.6B at the October 16 close) because they are issued to him, carry his votes and have no performance condition left; he would forfeit them only if he left Tesla before January 19, 2028; Forbes says it leaves them out⁴. Excluding them, our estimate would be about $913B, within about $5 billion of Forbes. Forbes' June 24, 2026 article values his SpaceX shares and vested options⁴; neither tracker publishes its other line items, so the rest of the gap cannot be traced. One likely reason is the value each gives the private Neuralink and Boring Company stakes; another is that Forbes' figure uses October 17-18 prices and ours the October 16 closes.

05Asset Breakdown

Musk's wealth is held almost entirely in equity positions in public and private companies; we count no cash because none is disclosed. SpaceX and Tesla shares are marked to market at their October 16, 2026 closing prices ($146.03 and $354.72). The SpaceX line uses the holdings in Musk's Schedule 13G filed August 13, 2026 (positions as of June 30, 2026), counting his vested shares and vested options but not his 1.3 billion unvested performance shares. Together, SpaceX and Tesla make up roughly 98% of the total.

Not included above: the unearned 2025 Tesla compensation package (423.7 million shares, about $150.3B at the October 16, 2026 close) and the 1.3 billion unvested SpaceX performance shares (about $190.1B). Both are described in the Contingent Awards table below. The roughly $13B of X acquisition debt sits inside SpaceX's corporate structure and is reflected in the equity value, not counted as a personal liability.

06Current Positions

07How the Fortune Was Built

08Profile

09The SpaceX IPO

Largest IPO in History

SpaceX filed its S-1 registration statement with the SEC on May 20, 2026, and priced its IPO on June 11, 2026 at $135 per share (about a $1.77 trillion valuation), selling 555.6 million Class A shares to raise $75 billion - about $86 billion after the underwriters exercised their over-allotment option on June 15. It is the largest IPO ever, about three times Saudi Aramco's $25.6 billion record from 2019.

Shares began trading on the Nasdaq as SPCX on June 12, opened at $150 and closed the first day at $160.95 (+19.2%). The stock hit an intraday high of $225.64 on June 16, fell to a record low of $108.37 around the start of August as other holders' lockups began expiring, and closed at $146.03 on October 16, 2026 - a market value of roughly $1.98 trillion. Musk sold no shares in the offering, and his own shares are locked up for 366 days, so the earliest he can sell is around June 12, 2027.

The public company combines the rocket and Starlink business, the xAI artificial intelligence lab (acquired by SpaceX in February 2026), and the X social media platform (acquired by xAI in March 2025) under one ticker. On August 14, 2026 SpaceX also completed its $60 billion acquisition of Cursor, issuing 389.3 million Class A shares, which lifted its share count to about 13.57 billion.

How the IPO Pushed Musk Past $1 Trillion

The arithmetic was straightforward. On June 12, 2026, the day SpaceX began trading, Bloomberg named Musk the world's first trillionaire at about $1.1 trillion, and Forbes reported the same milestone. At the October 16, 2026 close of $146.03, his vested SpaceX shares and options are worth about $744 billion. Add his Tesla holdings (413.2 million direct shares plus 286.4 million restricted shares from the 2018 award, about $248 billion together), his stakes in Neuralink and The Boring Company, and personal assets, and the total comes to about $1.01 trillion - just above the $1 trillion line, which he has crossed in both directions several times since June.

Unusual Features of the Offering

Retail allocation. SpaceX had targeted up to 30% of the offering for retail investors; the final allocation was about 20% (Bloomberg), and every eligible customer at Robinhood, Schwab, Fidelity, SoFi and E*Trade received at least one share.

Voting structure. Musk holds approximately 82.4% of voting power after the offering (per the final prospectus) through Class B shares carrying 10 votes per share. His economic stake is far smaller: his August 13, 2026 Schedule 13G reports beneficial ownership of about 6.42 billion shares (48.4%), but that includes 1.3 billion unvested performance shares; on vested shares and options alone his economic stake is roughly 36-38%. The S-1 also includes a provision that Musk "can only be removed from our board or these positions by the vote of Class B holders" - the same super-voting shares he himself controls.

Anthropic compute contract. The S-1 disclosed a $1.25 billion per month compute services agreement with Anthropic - xAI's direct competitor in frontier AI models - signed May 6, 2026 and running through May 2029, for up to approximately $45 billion in total. Either party can terminate it on 90 days' notice.

Underwriting syndicate. Goldman Sachs led the deal, with Morgan Stanley, BofA Securities, Citigroup and J.P. Morgan as joint book-running managers.

Institutional objections. In a joint letter announced May 14, 2026, NYC Comptroller Mark Levine, NYS Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli and CalPERS CEO Marcie Frost - representing over $1 trillion in pension assets - asked SpaceX to adopt one-share-one-vote or a sunset on its dual-class shares, a majority-independent board, a separate chair and CEO, an end to mandatory arbitration, and independent review of related-party deals. The dual-class structure was retained in the final prospectus.

Our separate feature article "SpaceX Files To Go Public" covers the S-1 in more depth, including the related-party transactions involving Tesla, the Anthropic compute contract, the Cursor acquisition and the Mars colony and space-based data center performance grants.

10Background

Early Life and Education

Born in Pretoria, South Africa, Elon Musk displayed an early aptitude for technology and entrepreneurship. He taught himself computer programming at age 12 and sold his first software - a game called Blastar - for approximately $500. After moving to Canada at age 17, Musk attended Queen's University before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned bachelor's degrees in economics and physics.

Early Ventures

Musk's entrepreneurial journey began with Zip2, a web software company he co-founded with his brother Kimbal in 1995. Compaq acquired Zip2 for $307 million in 1999, netting Musk $22 million. He immediately reinvested in X.com, an online financial services company that merged with Confinity to become PayPal. eBay's acquisition of PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion provided Musk with $175.8 million, which he used to fund his most ambitious ventures.

SpaceX: Making Life Multi-Planetary

In 2002, Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) with the goal of reducing space transportation costs and enabling the colonization of Mars. After three failed launches that nearly bankrupted the company, SpaceX successfully launched Falcon 1 in 2008. The company has since changed the aerospace industry with reusable rockets - one Falcon 9 first-stage booster (B1067) has now been launched and recovered 37 times, a record it set in August 2026. SpaceX conducted 165 orbital launches in 2025, all on Falcon 9. The company has won contracts with NASA and the Department of Defense (which the S-1 calls the "Department of War"), and built the Starlink satellite internet constellation into a global broadband network with 10.3 million subscribers at March 31, 2026.

Tesla: Accelerating Sustainable Energy

Musk joined Tesla Motors in 2004, leading the company's Series A funding round and becoming chairman of the board. He assumed the role of CEO in 2008, steering the company through near-bankruptcy during the 2008 financial crisis. Under his leadership, Tesla has grown from a niche electric vehicle manufacturer to one of the world's most valuable automakers, with a market capitalization of approximately $1.40 trillion as of the October 16, 2026 close. Its work in battery technology, autonomous driving and energy storage has reshaped the automotive and energy industries.

Tesla launched unsupervised Robotaxi service in Dallas and Houston in early 2026 and was operating it in 7 metro areas by its Q2 2026 report, including Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando and Tampa. FSD active subscriptions reached 1.48 million in Q2 2026, and Tesla delivered 486,532 vehicles in Q3 2026.

The SpaceX-xAI Mega-Merger

In what became one of the largest mergers in history at the time of announcement, SpaceX acquired Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI on February 2, 2026, creating a combined entity initially valued at $1.25 trillion. The deal, structured as an all-stock transaction, valued SpaceX at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion. The merger brought together SpaceX's rocket and Starlink satellite operations, xAI's Grok AI platform and Colossus supercomputer, and the X social media platform (which xAI had previously acquired in March 2025 for $33 billion) under a single corporate umbrella. Musk stated the primary goal was to develop "orbital data centers" - AI compute infrastructure in space.

How Musk Became the First Trillionaire

Elon Musk became the world's first trillionaire on June 12, 2026, the day SpaceX listed on the Nasdaq. Three events between late 2025 and mid-2026 got him there. First, the Delaware Supreme Court's December 19, 2025 ruling reversed the Tornetta decision and restored his 2018 Tesla compensation package; on June 16, 2026 he exercised those 303.96 million options (at about $23.34 a share, net-settled with no open-market sales) and received 286.4 million restricted shares, worth about $102 billion at the October 16, 2026 close. Second, the February 2026 SpaceX-xAI merger consolidated his scattered private-company holdings into a single $1.25 trillion entity. Third, SpaceX priced its IPO on June 11, 2026 at $135 a share (about $1.77 trillion) and began trading the next day under the ticker SPCX.

Bloomberg put his fortune at about $1.1 trillion on listing day and near $1.33 trillion at the June 16 peak. As SPCX fell, Bloomberg's figure dropped below $1 trillion by June 24 and to $684 billion by August 1, before climbing back to $1.04 trillion on October 5, 2026.

On top of those holdings, Tesla shareholders approved a new $1 trillion compensation package in November 2025 that could push his ownership to nearly 29% of Tesla if all milestones are met (none had been earned as of Tesla's 2026 proxy), and the SpaceX board granted him approximately 1.3 billion Class B performance shares in early 2026 contingent on extraordinary milestones including a million-person Mars colony and space-based data centers producing 100 terawatts of compute. None of those contingent grants are reflected in our net worth figure. Not every 2026 headline went his way: on May 18, 2026 a federal jury in Oakland rejected his claims against OpenAI on statute-of-limitations grounds. Musk said he will appeal; the verdict has no direct effect on the figures above.

11Additional Comments

There have been multiple times over the course of his life when Elon could have just taken his money and retired.

Instead, he has continued to challenge himself by starting some of the most complex companies imaginable - a mainstream electric vehicle company (Tesla), a space transportation and satellite Internet company (SpaceX), and a frontier AI lab (xAI).

The running of these companies has taken a tremendous toll on Musk - both Tesla and SpaceX were literally days or weeks away from declaring bankruptcy at various points in the 2000s.

In the end, however, Elon persevered, creating some of the most important and valuable companies in the world. As a result, Elon is the richest person in the world by a huge margin. Bloomberg named him the world's first trillionaire on June 12, 2026, the day SpaceX listed, and his fortune peaked near $1.33 trillion on June 16. As of October 18, 2026, Forbes puts him at $908.5 billion - more than double the next-richest person, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (about $372 billion on Forbes as of October 5, 2026).

12SpaceX IPO Key Dates and Prices

From the S-1 filing to the latest close used on this page.

13SpaceX 2025 Financial Snapshot

Segment revenue as disclosed in the S-1, with revenue for Q2 2026, SpaceX's first quarter as a public company (reported August 4, 2026).

2025 adjusted EBITDA was about $6.6B and 2025 capital expenditure was $20.74B, with the AI segment alone consuming $12.7B of that. Q2 2026 revenue was up 92% year over year, with a net loss of $541M. Starlink had 4.4 million subscribers at the end of 2024, 8.9 million at the end of 2025 and 10.3 million at March 31, 2026; earnings-call summaries put it near 12 million at June 30, 2026 (not yet confirmed against the quarterly filing).

14Bloomberg's Musk Figure Since the Listing

How the Bloomberg Billionaires Index tracked Musk as SPCX moved.

15Why Our Figure Differs From Forbes

Reconciling our sum-of-the-parts total with Forbes Real-Time.

Forbes' June 24, 2026 article values his SpaceX shares and vested options⁴. The remaining gap of about $5 billion cannot be traced, because Forbes does not publish its other line items; one likely reason is the value given to the private Neuralink and Boring Company stakes, another the different price dates.

16Contingent Awards Not Counted

Two performance grants that could add hundreds of billions of dollars if earned. Neither is in our $1,014.9B figure because of the extraordinary and uncertain nature of their vesting conditions.

17Frequently Asked Questions

18Sources and Method