Elon Musk just became the world’s first trillionaire.
With SpaceX opening on the Nasdaq at $150 a share Friday, his stake in the company is worth more than $766 billion. Combined with his Tesla stake, which is worth $280 billion, Musk’s net worth from both companies as of Friday is roughly $1.05 trillion.
The SpaceX IPO added more than $180 billion to Musk’s fortune. He’s now worth more than the next five richest billionaires in the world combined. His personal net worth is larger than the national GDPs of Taiwan, Ireland or Sweden.
Musk’s coronation as the first person in history to be worth $1 trillion is likely to add fuel to the debate over wealth inequality and the rise in power of America’s richest tech founders. Along with creating the world’s first trillionaire, the SpaceX IPO also minted thousands of new millionaires and several new billionaires among the employees and executives who own stock.
Shares of SpaceX were trading about 26% higher mid-afternoon on Friday at around $170 apiece. That values the company at more than $2 trillion.
Shares of Tesla were up about 1% at roughly $400 apiece.
Musk was first declared a billionaire by Bloomberg and Forbes in 2012, with the latter estimating his net worth at $2.4 billion at the time.
His fortune reached $20 billion in 2019 and skyrocketed the following year after a Tesla stock split, making Musk the world’s fifth centibillionaire — worth more than $100 billion — by Forbes’ estimate. In the six years since, Musk’s net worth has exploded by roughly tenfold.
His fortune has surged by a rate unmatched even by the decade’s previous titleholders of world’s richest person: Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Bernard Arnault. Larry Page, currently worth an estimated $295 billion, according to Forbes, takes a distant second place among the ranks of the world’s richest people.
Sergey Brin, Bezos and Larry Ellison follow, each worth more than $200 billion as of Friday, according to Forbes.
That said, Gates’ fortune would be a whopping $464 billion had he not given so much away to philanthropy, per Forbes‘ estimate.
