Elon Musk becomes world’s first trillionaire after SpaceX mega float

Elon Musk has become the world's first trillionaire. Elon Musk is never far from the headlines and now the Tesla and X owner is making history once again after the blockbuster float of his SpaceX company has made him the world’s first ever paper trillionaire. The 54-year-old’s net worth was estimated at 982.6bn US dollars (£733bn) before the float, according to Forbes, which has swelled to more than one trillion dollars after the record-breaking initial public offering (IPO). His fortune has been boosted -high valuation of his rocket and artificial intelligence (AI) firm SpaceX, in which he has a 38 per cent stake in total, worth 688 billion dollars (£514bn) at the initial IPO price, even before shares rocketed on opening. This adds to his shares in Tesla, social media platform X – formerly known as Twitter – and smaller stakes in his brain interface startup Neuralink and his tunnelling firm Boring Company. It means he has eclipsed many of his tech counterparts, with the combined net worth of Forbes listed top ranking billionaires – Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Oracle chairman Larry Ellison – having a combined fortune of 1.04 trillion dollars (£770bn) between them. But his mammoth personal wealth comes at a time when he has once again been stoking controversy on British shores. In a series of social media posts, Musk has joined the likes of far-right activist Tommy Robinson in highlighting demands for people to take to the streets in response to this month’s knife attack in Belfast. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer vowed to “crack down on anyone who is fuelling this division” amid criticism of Musk and the role played . It is not the first time he has waded into British politics and contentious UK issues, or indeed picked battles with politicians – and others – across the world. But it is his “cult-like status” that has resonated with retail investors for the SpaceX float, according to XTB’s Kathleen Brooks, with the firm offering an unusually high proportion of shares in the offer to retail investors – thought to be around 20 per cent to 25 per cent – alongside large institutional players. SpaceX is setting itself some bold aims – from colonising Mars to deploying AI data centres in space – and many are keen to buy into Musk’s vision. As founder, chairman and chief executive of SpaceX, Musk will have an unusual amount of influence over what is now a publicly listed company.