Elon Musk has crossed a milestone that few could have imagined two decades ago. According to Forbes, the billionaire’s fortune briefly touched $500 billion this week, making him the first person in history to reach the halfway mark to a trillion.
Musk’s wealth, driven largely by a rebound in Tesla’s stock and steady gains at SpaceX, rose to $500.1 billion on Wednesday before dipping back to $499.1 billion, the magazine’s Real-Time Billionaires tracker reported.
At 54, Musk remains the world’s richest man by a wide margin. The closest contender, Larry Ellison of Oracle, is valued at $350.7 billion. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg follows at $245.8 billion.
The scale of Musk’s fortune reflects a career built on both risk and reinvention. After emigrating from South Africa and graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, he dropped out of Stanford and soon made his first fortune. In 1999, he sold his software company, Zip2, to Compaq for more than $300 million.
He went on to co-found X.com, which later merged with PayPal, before launching SpaceX in 2002 with the audacious goal of colonising Mars. Two years later, he became chairman of Tesla, steering the electric carmaker through early struggles into one of the most valuable companies on the planet.
Musk’s vast fortune has also brought controversy. His ventures into politics and social media have rattled markets in the past, leading to sharp fluctuations in Tesla’s share price. Yet his ability to recover from setbacks, and the enduring value of his companies, have kept him firmly at the top of the wealth rankings.
Whether Musk will actually become the world’s first trillionaire remains an open question. But with his net worth now at the halfway point, the prospect no longer seems entirely far-fetched.
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