Elon Musk becomes world’s first trillionaire after SpaceX IPO

In a post on the social media platform he owns, Elon Musk recently lamented: “Whoever said ‘money can’t buy happiness’ really knew what they were talking about.”

Now the world’s richest person can put that maxim to an even bigger test as he adds a new title: world’s first trillionaire.

SpaceX shares opened at US$150 each, 11 per cent above their offering price after they began trading in New York on Friday, valuing the rocket and AI-company Musk founded at roughly US$2 trillion.

His fortune now stands at the once-unimaginable figure of almost US$1.05 trillion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That is more than three times that of the world’s second-richest person, Google co-founder Larry Page.

It was less than 10 years ago that Bloomberg’s wealth index registered its first fortune of more than US$100 billion – a milestone Musk blew past in 2020.

He has since come to dominate the ranks of the world’s richest, first as Tesla evolved into one of the all-time best-performing stocks and later as investors scrambled for a piece of Space Exploration Technologies Corp, as SpaceX is formally known, now among the world’s most valuable companies.