Elon Musk becomes the world's first trillionaire after SpaceX's record stock debut
Key takeaways
- Technology magnate Elon Musk became the world's first trillionaire on Friday, after his aerospace company Space X made its stock-market debut.
- Space X shares began trading on the Nasdaq, under the ticker SPCX, at $150, above the $135 listing price.
- The milestone reignited the debate over inequality.
Why this matters: an international story with cross-border implications worth tracking.
Technology magnate Elon Musk became the world's first trillionaire on Friday, after his aerospace company Space X made its stock-market debut. Following the IPO, which raised a record roughly $75 billion and valued the company at about $1.77 trillion, the net worth of the owner of Tesla, the social network X and Neuralink stood at around $1.1 trillion.
Space X shares began trading on the Nasdaq, under the ticker SPCX, at $150, above the $135 listing price. With that, Musk came to be worth more than the next five billionaires on the list combined; the second, Google co-founder Larry Page, stands at about $290 billion, according to Forbes. It is, however, wealth on paper : most of it is in shares rather than cash, so while Musk can borrow against his holdings, a large-scale sale could sink the value of his companies.
The milestone reignited the debate over inequality. A report by Oxfam Interm n calculates that the entrepreneur's fortune is equivalent to that of the poorest 46% of the world's population, some 3.8 billion people, and, according to an analysis by Le Grand Continent, exceeds the annual gross domestic product of 172 countries. That Elon Musk's fortune surpasses a trillion dollars marks an unprecedented milestone in the advance of oligarchic power and a dark day for democracy, said Susana Ruiz, head of Fiscal Justice at Oxfam. The organization estimated that a 10% tax on that fortune would be enough to eradicate extreme poverty worldwide for a year.