With the initial public offering (IPO) of SpaceX stock on June 12, 2026, Elon Musk’s has become the first person in human history whose wealth has exceeded one trillion U.S. dollars ($1,000,000,000,000). Although most of this wealth is not in “real” dollars, but instead is tied up in the market value of Tesla and SpaceX stock, this still represents a significant milestone in the advancement of wealth inequality.
The IPO has since raised $85.7 billion, making it the largest IPO in financial history, but represents only 5% of SpaceX stock. After the stock price increased during post-IPO trading, SpaceX was valued at over $2 trillion at the end of June 12. Musk himself owns roughly 40% of SpaceX.
Very large numbers are hard to imagine. It is already difficult to imagine the wealth of a billionaire, but a trillionaire is a billionaire one thousand times over. To get a sense of the scale of Elon Musk’s wealth, here are some examples:
- Earning one dollar per minute, or $60 per hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days per year, would result in about $526,000 per year, a salary that is at least in the realm of possibility for highly-paid professionals. At this rate, and assuming no expenses, it would take 1,900 years to become a billionaire; at least this is within the length of recorded human history. Becoming a trillionaire would take 1.9 million years, about 6 times as long as our species Homo sapiens has existed (about 300,000 years).
- A U.S. one dollar bill is about 0.11 millimeters (0.0043 inches) thick. One million dollar bills would make a stack about 110 meters long, about the length of a football field (of either kind). One billion dollars would make a stack 110 kilometers (68 miles) long, about an hour of highway driving. One trillion dollars stacked together would circle the Earth 2.7 times, or reach over a quarter of the way to the Moon.
- Elon Musk is nearly 55 years old. To accumulate his $1.1 trillion net worth in 55 years would require an average of over $630 per second. That’s nearly $55 million per day, for 55 years.
- According to Oxfam, Musk is richer than the poorest 3.8 billion people combined (46% of the world’s population).
How did Musk accumulate so much wealth? He certainly did not earn it! His companies have received an estimated $38 billion dollars worth of contracts and subsidies from the U.S. government. He hypes up his companies, making unrealistic promises of products that often don’t get delivered, to increase the stock price and, with it, his wealth. And of course, like any capitalist, he exploits his workers, forcing unsafe working conditions at both SpaceX and Tesla.
The SpaceX IPO was also indirectly funded by workers’ retirement accounts, because SpaceX stock will be added to major stock market indexes in the coming days to months, resulting in forced buying of an estimated $15–30 billion worth of SpaceX stock. Many people will soon become indirect investors in SpaceX whether they want to or not, through index funds or retirement accounts such as 401(k)s that invest in indexes.
And what does Musk do with his unearned wealth? He bought the social media platform Twitter, and now uses it to promote extreme-right viewpoints such as promoting racism and transphobia, demonizing immigrants and supporting the far-right parties around the world like the German AfD. He spends a little bit of money here and there to support far-right parties and politicians, including “only” $277 million (which is almost nothing to him) to elect Donald Trump in 2024. After helping to buy the 2024 U.S. election, Musk created the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” which led to the firing of hundreds of thousands of federal workers while several federal investigations into his companies got dropped.
Why should one person have so much wealth, and the power that comes with that wealth? The existence of a trillionaire at the same time that people around the world lack housing, healthcare, food, clean water, and other necessities of life, shows that capitalism does not work for the average person. Instead, it exposes what this society has always been, a dictatorship of the rich.
