How Elon Musk Made a Trillion Dollars

**Jessica Mendoza** (0:10)
When SpaceX went public on Friday, it kicked off the first day of trading for what might have been the most highly anticipated initial public offering in history.
It was certainly the most expensive one. SpaceX shares opened at a record $150 a piece. In Texas, CEO Elon Musk stood in front of a video of rockets launching and addressed investors.

**Elon Musk** (0:34)
And let me tell you, if people had told me this was gonna happen, I was like, man, you must be smoking some really good crack.

**Jessica Mendoza** (0:44)
But the IPO itself wasn't the only history made last week. SpaceX going public also made Musk the world's first trillionaire.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:53)
The stake in SpaceX now worth $820 billion. You add in that Tesla stake worth about $280 billion, and his total net worth as we have it right now, is over $1.1 trillion.

**Theo Francis** (1:09)
It's remarkable, it's clearly a watershed moment.

**Jessica Mendoza** (1:12)
Our colleague Theo Francis covers executive pay. Why is this an important moment?

**Theo Francis** (1:23)
It's pretty striking. I do our annual ranking of executive pay of CEO pay and every year, there's a few CEOs who make 100 million or more. 100 million, that's a lot of money. And yet, I have to remember to use an M and say million, instead of B for billion when you're talking about the wealth of people like Zuckerberg and Bezos and of course Musk when we're going to have to start using a T.
It's a really remarkable moment in terms of individual wealth. And I think the real question is, how far does it go?

**Jessica Mendoza** (2:07)
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Tuesday, June 16th.
Coming up on the show, who wants to be a trillionaire?

**SPEAKER_5** (2:32)
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**Jessica Mendoza** (3:42)
Before the SpaceX IPO, before he was a trillionaire, you did the story where you tried to put into context just how wealthy Elon Musk is. Why is that such a difficult number to communicate?

**Theo Francis** (3:55)
I mean, do we really understand how big a trillion dollars is?
Like, that's usually the kind of number that we talk about when we talk about economies, when we talk about GDP growth, not when we talk about companies even, very few companies until recently even had a trillion-dollar market capitalization, which means the total value of what investors think they're worth going forward. Only a handful of companies have reached that level. But now we're talking about an individual, and that's just totally new territory.

**Jessica Mendoza** (4:26)
Right. It's hard to wrap your mind around that number, much less what it could mean for a single human being.

**Theo Francis** (4:32)
Exactly.

**Jessica Mendoza** (4:33)
So how did you wind up explaining it?

**Theo Francis** (4:35)
I mean, the only thing you can do is compare it to other things, right? You could say, oh, a trillion is a thousand billion, but that doesn't really do much.

**Jessica Mendoza** (4:42)
That doesn't help me.

**Theo Francis** (4:43)
Right. What's a billion, right? So we decided we were going to try to put it in the context of everyday things.

**Jessica Mendoza** (4:51)
Okay.

**Theo Francis** (4:52)
So just shy of a trillion dollars, where he was before the IPO, he could buy 2.4 million houses in the United States at the typical sale price at the beginning of this year.

**Jessica Mendoza** (5:06)
For context, the median sale price for a house in the US in the first quarter of 2026 was about $400,000. So Musk could buy 2.4 million of those.

**Theo Francis** (5:17)
I mean, that's just the beginning, right? He could also buy all the NFL and NBA teams, every one of them, and still have $500 billion left over.