Elon Musk was already the richest person on the planet. Now, thanks to Tesla, xAI, and SpaceX’s surging valuations, he’s worth more than $400 billion, according to Bloomberg News’s calculations.
Specifically, he’s worth $439.2 billion.
For reference, the next richest men alive are Amazon (AMZN) founder and Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos, Meta (META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Oracle (ORCL) Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index. They’re worth, respectively, $244 billion, $219 billion, and $197 billion. Musk is also at least as wealthy as Mansa Musa, the emperor of the West African Mali Empire and previous record holder of richest man to ever live, who historians estimate was worth around $400 billion, according to the BBC.
The impetus for Musk’s latest surge in wealth is SpaceX’s newfound value of $350 billion, which makes it the most valuable startup in the world. On Wednesday, SpaceX and its investors agreed to buy $1.25 billion of shares from employees and company insiders.
“What’s really crazy about this is that almost no investors wanted to sell shares even at a $350B valuation! SpaceX reduced the amount of shares it bought back from employees in order to allow some new investors in,” Musk wrote on his X Wednesday.
Besides SpaceX, Musk is the CEO of Tesla and owner of X. Corp. His other companies include artificial intelligence startup xAI, brain chip firm Neuralink, and tunneling firm The Boring Company.
xAI, recently raised $6 billion at a $50 billion valuation less than two years after he founded it. That’s also more than double its valuation in May, when it was valued at $24 billion at a value of $6 billion from backers like Andreessen Horowitz and Saudi Arabian investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal.
Musk owns more than 13% of Tesla shares, which have surged since President-elect Donald Trump won the presidential election in November. The stock climbed to a new record of $415 per share on Wednesday, narrowly surpassing its prior record for intraday trading of $414.50 per share on Nov. 4, 2021.
In recent weeks, investors have been excited by Trump’s potential actions that could aid the automaker, including streamlining autonomous vehicle regulations and ending the $7,500 consumer tax credits for electric vehicles. Musk has said that ending those credits will hurt Tesla’s rivals more than it damages his company, although analysts expect some downside in the short term.
Several analysts have also raised their price targets for the stock in recent days as they look to catch up with the stock surge, often pointing to Tesla’s plans for driverless vehicles and humanoid robots.
