Elon Musk is on the brink of becoming the world’s first trillionaire – and he may get there without collecting a single dollar from Tesla‘s record-shattering pay package.
The Tesla and SpaceX chief executive has seen his personal fortune explode so rapidly that analysts now say he could cross the $1 trillion net-worth threshold later this year.
It is all being driven by surging valuations at his private rocket company and renewed legal victories – even as his controversial new Tesla compensation deal remains unpaid.
The amount is a stunning milestone for the world’s richest man, whose wealth has ballooned amid political upheaval and wildly differing success across his sprawling business empire.
According to estimates cited by the Wall Street Journal, Musk’s net worth has climbed to roughly $726 billion, more than doubling in just a year and placing him within striking distance of the so-called ‘four-comma club.’
That trajectory has been fueled not by Tesla alone, but by a dramatic revaluation of SpaceX, which has been valued as high as $800 billion in recent secondary share sales.
With Musk owning roughly 42% of the company, a long-anticipated public offering, widely expected to be one of the largest IPOs in history, could push his personal stake past the trillion-dollar mark almost overnight.
All of it is happening before Musk receives any payout from Tesla’s newly approved compensation plan.
Elon Musk is closing in on trillionaire status — and he may get there without cashing in Tesla’s historic pay package
Despite their on-again, off-again relationship, Musk was seen dining with Trump and Melania at Mar a Lago on Saturday night
Musk appears to be back in the Trump fold once again and was seen alongside the president over the weekend
The package could eventually be worth close to $1 trillion on its own if he hits an ambitious slate of performance targets that would radically reshape the electric-car maker into an artificial-intelligence and robotics powerhouse.
The explosion is Musk’s wealth comes as Tesla is struggling in the marketplace.
On Friday, Tesla reported that it delivered 1.64 million vehicles in 2025, a 9% decline from the previous year – its second straight annual drop.
The company also lost its title as the world’s top electric-vehicle seller, overtaken by China’s BYD, which sold 2.26 million vehicles last year.
The reversal has been fueled by a customer backlash over Musk’s right-wing political positions, the expiration of US tax credits, and mounting global competition – particularly in Europe and China.
Yet Wall Street has largely shrugged.
Investors instead rallied behind Musk’s vision of Tesla’s future as something far beyond a car company.
He has repeatedly said he expects software updates to allow hundreds of thousands of Teslas to operate autonomously with zero human intervention by the end of this year.
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Elon Musk rose to rare political prominence alongside President Donald Trump, becoming a near-constant presence in Washington during the first six months of Trump’s second term
In 2025 Musk’s net worth more than doubled in a single year, defying slowing car sales and intensifying political backlash. Musk is pictured in August 2000
As his fortune reaches once-unthinkable levels, Musk has openly wondered whether reality itself is a simulation. Musk is seen in November 2006
Tesla lost its EV sales crown in 2025, but Musk’s personal fortune kept climbing at a historic pace. Musk is pictured in 2009
The company is also planning to begin production in 2026 of its AI-powered Cybercab, a vehicle with no steering wheel or pedals.
It’s the long-term bet with Tesla as a robotics and artificial-intelligence platform that persuaded shareholders to approve Musk’s record-breaking compensation plan at the company’s annual meeting in November.
Musk’s personal fortune was further supercharged two weeks ago when the Delaware Supreme Court reversed a prior ruling that had blocked his 2018 Tesla pay package, now valued at roughly $139 billion.
The decision cleared a major legal obstacle that had hovered over his wealth for years.
Meanwhile, SpaceX has continued to push toward full reusability of its massive Starship rocket – a cornerstone of Musk’s ambitions for the moon and Mars – even as he openly discusses building AI data centers in space and factories on the moon.
All of this has unfolded against a backdrop of political chaos.
Over the past year, Musk rose to extraordinary influence in Washington, becoming a near-constant presence around President Donald Trump, before their relationship imploded in spectacular fashion.
Musk’s year has been dramatic, unpredictable, and ultimately unmoved by political fallout
The alliance later fractured publicly, ending a period in which Musk wielded extraordinary informal influence over federal spending and policy debates
SpaceX’s possible IPO could make Musk the first trillionaire before the year is over
Musk later appeared to soften tensions following the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, and he now appears poised to funnel substantial sums toward Republican candidates ahead of this years midterm elections.
Musk has framed the chaos through his long-running fascination with simulation theory – the idea that reality may not be real at all, but rather an elaborate digital construct.
During a recent podcast appearance, Musk explained his worldview bluntly.
‘I do have this theory about predicting the future, which is that the most interesting outcome is the most likely,’ Musk said.
‘Another way to think of it is like we could be an alien Netflix series and that series is only going to get continued if our ratings are good,’ he said.
‘If you apply Darwin to simulation theory then only the most interesting simulations will continue. Therefore, the most interesting outcome is most likely because it’s either that or annihilation.’
Musk has been publicly musing about simulation theory for more than a decade, arguing that the rapid evolution of technology, from early video games like Pong to photorealistic, massively multiplayer virtual worlds, suggests that advanced civilizations would inevitably create realities indistinguishable from our own.
‘Given that we’re clearly on a trajectory to have games that are indistinguishable from reality…it would seem to follow that the odds we’re in based reality is one in billions,’ Musk said in 2016. ‘So tell me what’s wrong with that argument.’
