Elon Musk is poised to become the world’s first trillionaire. It’s a staggering quantity of wealth by no means seen earlier than in the historical past of human commerce.
Musk already owns $273 billion in inventory and choices thanks to his position as Tesla CEO. But if the initial public offering of SpaceX—his rocket and synthetic intelligence firm—goes as deliberate subsequent week, he may quickly be value a further $841 billion. (He would personal almost half the inventory of SpaceX, which the IPO is on observe to worth at $1.77 trillion in complete.) All instructed, that’s $1.11 trillion for Musk from simply his two public firms.
However, Musk’s wealth is paper wealth, not a pile of money in a financial institution someplace. All of it is topic to how traders proceed to worth his firms, Tesla and SpaceX, going ahead.
One trillion {dollars} is a million million {dollars}. That can be unimaginable to spend in any cheap method in a single lifetime. If one have been to spend $1 million each hour day by day, it might nonetheless take greater than a century to spend $1 trillion.
To assist put it in context, listed here are six issues which can be (quickly) to be value lower than Elon Musk.
Across the globe, solely 20 international locations have economies which can be bigger than $1.1 trillion, in accordance to the International Monetary Fund. That means the overwhelming majority of the world’s nations have an financial system value lower than Musk.
Among them are Taiwan ($977 billion), Ireland ($779 billion) Sweden ($760 billion) and Singapore ($660 billion), together with Musk’s native South Africa ($480 billion).
Of course, you don’t have to go abroad to discover economies smaller than Musk’s funding portfolio.
The island of Manhattan, house base for a lot of of America’s monetary and company powerhouses together with Wall Street, had a gross home product of simply over $1 trillion in 2024. (That’s the most up-to-date yr for which information is obtainable from the Federal Reserve.)
Houston is the nation’s third largest metropolis, behind solely New York and Los Angeles. The Texas metropolis, situated on the Gulf Coast, is a hub for the booming oil and gasoline trade in the United States.
All the property in the metropolis, each residential and industrial, is value about $879 billion in complete, in accordance to the most up-to-date information obtainable.
After housing, automobiles and vans are the largest buy made by most Americans.
The common worth of a brand new automotive hit a file of $48,402 throughout all gross sales final yr. Even so, Americans purchased 16.3 million new automobiles in 2025, which price a complete $789 billion.
Musk is already the richest particular person in the world. But his web value may quickly depart his tech billionaire friends in the mud.
Even in case you lump collectively the wealth estimates of the subsequent 4 richest – Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Oracle founder Larry Ellison and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos – their mixed web worths of $1.09 trillion falls simply wanting Musk’s wealth.
Like Musk, all of them made their fortunes from shares of the tech corporations they based.
Sports groups are the certainly one of the costliest toys billionaires love to buy. But $1 trillion may purchase you just about each sports activities crew on the planet.
In truth, the 50 most dear sports activities groups from round the world are value solely a 3rd of that when mixed– an estimated $353 billion in accordance to Forbes, which tracks sports activities groups’ valuations. That consists of the most dear, the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys at an estimated $13 billion, down to quantity 50, the Toronto Raptors of the NBA at about $5 billion.