Topline
Elon Musk on Monday regained his trillionaire status as rallying SpaceX and Tesla shares added more than $60 billion to his net worth, after he fell below the trillion-dollar threshold last week following a sharp decline in SpaceX’s stock and new restrictions on his Tesla equity.
Key Facts
Shares of SpaceX jumped 7.6% and Tesla’s surged by 8.6% as of Monday afternoon, raising Musk’s net worth by $62.3 billion––to above $1 trillion.
Musk holds 4.8 billion shares of SpaceX and another 350 million stock options with an exercise price of $8.40 per share, and earlier this month, Musk disclosed he holds about 700 million Tesla shares.
He remains the world’s richest person by far, ranking ahead of Google co-founders Larry Page ($288.7 billion) and Sergey Brin ($266.3 billion), but Musk’s fortune is well below a June 16 peak of $1.45 trillion.
Why did Musk lose his trillionaire status?
Forbes last week removed $116 billion of restricted Tesla stock—accounting for a roughly 8% stake in the company—from estimates of Musk’s net worth after he gave up $7.1 billion in shares to cover the exercise price on all stock options he received as part of his 2018 CEO performance award. Those options were voided by a Delaware judge in 2024 and restored by the Delaware Supreme Court in 2025, and after the latter ruling, Tesla replaced the stock award with a new one that only pays off if he stays in a senior leadership role through January 2028. His net worth also declined as SpaceX shares erased their 41% post-IPO surge.
key background
Musk—who has ranked the world’s richest person since May 2024—became the world’s first trillionaire after SpaceX’s record-setting IPO earlier this month boosted his net worth to $1.1 trillion. It became Musk’s latest wealth milestone, after in December 2024 he became the first person to be worth $400 billion, and later became the first to reach the $500 billion, $600 billion, $700 billion, $800 billion and $900 billion thresholds through early 2026.
tangent
Tesla shareholders approved a compensation package for Musk in November that, on its own, could be worth close to $1 trillion, should the company achieve several goals over the next decade.
