Elon Musk now boasts a net worth of $400 billion, making him the first person in history to ever hit that milestone.
The world’s richest person became even richer Wednesday after SpaceX and its investors agreed to buy $1.25 billion of insider shares, valuing the company at $350 billion, Bloomberg reported. The move ballooned the founder’s net worth by $50 billion, meaning he is now worth $439 billion, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Musk owns roughly 12 percent of Tesla, the world’s most valuable car company, Forbes noted. The company’s shareholders also gave him a 2018 compensation package worth more than $50 billion. But a Delaware judge struck it down Monday. She wrote in her decision that what would have been the largest pay deal in history was an “unfathomable sum” that “seems to have been calibrated to help Musk achieve what he believed would make ‘a good future for humanity.’”
Monday’s decision reaffirms her ruling in January, when she also rejected the pay package. “Never incorporate your company in the state of Delaware,” Musk wrote in January on X, another company he owns.
He has vowed to use 58 percent of his Tesla shares as collateral for his personal loans, according to Bloomberg.
Musk acquired the social media platform, then known as Twitter, for $44 billion in 2022. Fidelity valued its stake in X at $5.53 million at the end of October, a nearly 72 percent decrease in value since Musk took over the company, according to its Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Fund monthly report.
The tech billionaire also owns about 54 per cent of xAI, an artificial intelligence company he founded in 2023. The startup was valued at $50 billion last month, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Then there’s SpaceX. Musk owns roughly 42 percent of the aerospace company, which was valued at $210 billion in June, according to Bloomberg. He also founded The Boring Company, an infrastructure company that says it aims to dig transportation tunnels to “solve traffic.” The company announced that it was worth $5.68 billion in April 2022 after a Series C funding round.
As of Wednesday, the business is valued at $350 billion, meaning SpaceX is the most valuable private startup in the world, according to Bloomberg.
Neuralink, Musk’s computer-brain interface company that is developing brain chips, was valued at $5 billion as of June 2024, according to Reuters. In January, Musk posted on X that the first human patient received an implant from Neuralink and was “recovering well.”
Musk contributed a massive $230 million of his personal coffers to Trump’s America PAC, which he created, in the last month leading up to the presidential election, FEC filings Thursday revealed. In the weeks leading up to Election Day, Musk made three separate $25 million donations to the super PAC, according to the records.
But that wasn’t all; the SpaceX founder also donated more than $20 million to the controversially named RBG (Ruth Bader Ginsburg) PAC, which falsely presented the late Supreme Court Justice as a Trump champion, in late October, new filings show.
Trump tapped Musk to lead the newly created department of government efficiency alongside billionaire entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.
Despite campaigning on improving economic conditions for working class Americans, Trump has filled his next administration with a hefty handful of billionares, including Musk. The net worth of Trump’s second White House is estimated to be larger than the gross domestic product of more than 11 dozen countries.
Billionaires have doubled their wealth in the past decade, amounting to a combined total of $14 trillion, Swiss bank UBS reported this week.
Source: independent.co.uk