The world’s first billionaire, Elon Musk, is no longer a trillionaire, having set a new record for losing more money than anyone else in the history of finance. Since Musk’s fortune peaked at $1.32 trillion in mid-June, it has fallen to $957 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, meaning that in less than two weeks Musk has lost about $363 billion. That’s almost as much money as the country of Nigeria, and all of its 242 million citizens, earns in a year. Scientists are developing a new type of tiny violin – so infinitesimal that it can only be seen using an electron microscope – to commemorate the event.
Of course, Musk was only able to lose so much wealth because he had gained so much, just as dramatically. No person has ever amassed such a fortune in the financial markets – or had such massive sums to lose. Musk’s losses over the past two weeks are greater than the total wealth of the next richest person in the world, Google co-founder Larry Page.
The truly stratospheric changes in Musk’s wealth began after the US presidential election in November 2024, when it seemed as if Musk had made the largest structured trade ever recorded: after spending less than $300 million on the Trump campaign, he gained more than $200 billion in personal wealth, as the stock price of his car company almost reached 90 in December 2024. For Musk, the increase in wealth his personal campaign that coincided with Trump’s return to power appeared to have paid $750 for every dollar invested in the election. But that has been eclipsed by the latest inflation of Musk’s wealth as he has channeled investor confidence in his artificial intelligence and space exploration company, SpaceX.
SpaceX’s most impressive launch so far was its Nasdaq IPO, which raised $86 billion from investors in one day, the largest initial public offering (IPO) in history. (The entire 13-year Apollo program, the first and so far only initiative to put humans on another world, cost about $200 billion in today’s money.) Musk owns several billion shares in SpaceX, and the wild goals he has floated for the company — data centers in space, cities on Mars — were attractive to investors who either believed him, or believed other people believed him. The IPO was underwritten with four bids for each share sold. SpaceX’s large size also meant that it would quickly add to share indices, and thus to index-tracking funds, and therefore for your retirement savings, whether you want to invest in them or not.
This financial market power is definitely Musk’s real product. He’s not profiting from spaceships, at least not yet (SpaceX lost $5 billion last year), and the revenue he gets from selling Tesla cars or advertising on his social media platform, X, is secondary to the wealth he amasses from holding assets in the financial markets. What Musk’s investors are buying, whether they’re professionals or retail investors using apps, is a smaller piece of the same thing: a security that will move in price, sometimes dramatically, because Elon Musk will. His aggressive pursuit of greater market power, his political interventions, his attention-seeking behavior and his wild claims about technology: all these things contribute to his central proposition to investors, which is a fast-moving prize. What is sold is volatility.
The flip side of this is that while Musk has a historic ability to create momentum in the financial markets, he is just as subject to it as any other investor, if not more so. When the market starts to worry—perhaps that political instability might be bad for business, or that there might be some risk in a company that’s losing half a million dollars an hour, or just that other people are selling tech stocks because the whole market looks clearly frothy—that momentum can move just as quickly in the other direction. The richer a person becomes from the financial markets, the more they will inevitably lose when the market turns against them.
In Musk’s case, it’s also worth asking to what extent he was ever really a trillionaire. His wealth is in a sense less real than other people’s, in that it exists only as a specific type of financial market value that is very difficult to crystallize. If he were to personally try to cash in any significant portion of his SpaceX fortune, the company’s stock price would likely plummet; Musk’s sale of billions of dollars in Tesla stock in 2022 coincided with a steep drop in the company’s market capitalization. T’s shifting focus from Tesla to Twitter to SpaceX, from technology to politics to cities on Mars, is a story of a man trying to keep the market excited, but also looking for a more consistent Brand story. the man with the million pound note, his wealth is self-reinforcing, but it is also impossible to spend, for example, the estimated 250 billion barrels of oil commanded by Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman if you actually ARE the richest man in the worldyou don’t do anything so vain as to accept it.
(Further reading: Elon Musk is ready to help himself to your retirement fund)
