Musk is now half-way to becoming the first ever trillionaire. <\/p>\n
Elon Musk achieved yet another major milestone Wednesday, becoming the first ever person worth half-a-trillion dollars. The richest person on the planet is now worth $500 billion, as of 3:30 pm Eastern, per Forbes\u2019 Real-Time Billionaires tracker<\/a>. Musk, who became the first person ever worth $400 billion or more in December, is $150 billion ahead of runner-up Larry Ellison\u2014and half-way to becoming the world\u2019s first trillionaire.<\/p>\n Shares of Tesla climbed by nearly 4% as of 3:30 pm Eastern Wednesday, adding an estimated $9.3 billion to Musk\u2019s fortune, as investors continue to celebrate the prospect of a refocused Musk. The EV maker\u2019s stock price has nearly doubled since Musk first announced on the company\u2019s April earnings call that he would be stepping back from his role as head of President Trump\u2019s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to spend more time on Tesla. With Tesla\u2019s market cap back within 10% of the all-time high it hit in December, Musk\u2019s 12% stake in the company is now worth $191 billion.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s excluding performance-based Tesla stock options from Musk\u2019s 2018 CEO compensation package that would be worth $133 billion today if the award hadn\u2019t been voided by a Delaware judge in January 2024. Forbes has discounted the value of those options by 50% pending the outcome of Musk\u2019s ongoing appeal of the ruling to the Delaware Supreme Court. Meanwhile, in September, Tesla\u2019s board proposed a new, record-breaking pay package that could give Musk additional stock worth up to $1 trillion (before taxes and the cost of unlocking the restricted shares) if Tesla achieves \u201cMars-shot\u201d performance milestones like growing its market cap more than eightfold over the 10-year life of the award.<\/p>\n Tesla isn\u2019t the only company Musk has to thank for his half-trillion-dollar fortune. His rocket maker SpaceX, which he founded in 2002, is now worth $400 billion based on a private tender offer in August, up from $350 billion last December. Musk owns an estimated 42% stake in SpaceX worth $168 billion. And then there\u2019s xAI Holdings, which Musk formed in March, when he merged his new artificial intelligence company xAI with the social media company he acquired in 2022, X (formerly Twitter), in a deal that valued the combined company at $113 billion. Musk owns an estimated 53% stake in xAI Holdings worth $60 billion.<\/p>\n Hitting the $500 billion net worth mark is just the latest in a series of milestones Musk has achieved over the past half decade. Worth just $24.6 billion in March 2020, soaring Tesla shares made him the fifth person ever worth $100 billion<\/a>, in August 2020. He became the world\u2019s richest person<\/a> for the first time in January 2021, with a nearly $190 billion net worth. Then, in September 2021, he became the third person ever worth $200 billion<\/a> (after Amazon\u2019s Jeff Bezos and Frenchman Bernard Arnault of luxury goods conglomerate LVMH). Musk went on to hit $300 billion<\/a> in November 2021 and $400 billion<\/a> in December 2024.<\/p>\n If he keeps up that pace, Musk could become the world\u2019s first trillionaire before March 2033, when the first of two vesting dates for his $1 trillion Tesla pay package hits. But according to Musk, that award isn\u2019t about the money anyway.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not about \u2018compensation\u2019, but about me having enough influence over Tesla to ensure safety if we build millions of robots,\u201d Musk wrote in a September X post. \u201cIf I can just get kicked out in the future by activist shareholder advisory firms who don\u2019t even own Tesla shares themselves, I\u2019m not comfortable with that future.\u201d<\/p>\n Note: Musk ended Wednesday worth an estimated $499.1 billion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Musk is now half-way to becoming the first ever trillionaire. Elon Musk achieved yet another major milestone Wednesday,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":195665,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[113350,15885,28,9556,11,69852,1513,1019,3479,10204,4119],"class_list":{"0":"post-195664","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-500-billion","9":"tag-billionaire","10":"tag-business","11":"tag-doge","12":"tag-elon-musk","13":"tag-richest","14":"tag-spacex","15":"tag-tesla","16":"tag-trump","17":"tag-twitter","18":"tag-xai"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=195664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195664\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/195665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=195664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=195664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=195664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}