ONE RICH MAN, ONE TRILLION DOLLARS

SAN FRANCISCO. – For some time Elon Musk has been, or at least never far from being, the world’s richest person.

He became the first person to achieve a net worth of more than half a trillion dollars in October last year, according to Forbes.

A month later, Tesla shareholders approved a record-breaking pay deal that could be worth US$1 trillion.

But last Friday, Musk’s net worth soared past billionaire to trillionaire status after his rocket-builder and satellite operator SpaceX, which also owns X, Grok and Starlink, went public.

However, he is known for more than simply his immense wealth.

The SpaceX boss has used his social media platform to air his views on a vast array of topics, ranging from current affairs to the future of humanity.

His forays into politics have become more frequent in recent years, and include helping Donald Trump win the 2024 US presidential election, to the frustration of some investors.

Musk has since also taken an interest in UK matters – drawing scrutiny as well as criticism from some politicians, including the Prime Minister, for both his views and the way X influences the public debate and mood.

          Where was Elon Musk born?

Born in Pretoria, South Africa, Musk showed his talents for entrepreneurship early, going door-to-door with his brother selling homemade chocolate Easter eggs and developing his first computer game at the age of 12.

He has described his childhood as difficult, affected by his parents’ divorce, bullying at school and his own difficulty picking up on social cues because of Asperger’s Syndrome.

At the earliest opportunity, he left home for college, moving to Canada and then the US, where he studied economics and physics at the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League college.

In a 2010 essay for Marie Claire, his first wife, Justine Musk, a writer whom he met in college and married in 2000, wrote that even before making his millions Musk was “not a man who takes no for an answer”.

“The will to compete and dominate, that made him so successful in business, did not magically shut off when he came home,” she recalled, adding that he told her while dancing at their wedding, “I am the alpha in this relationship.”

   How did Elon Musk make his money?

After being accepted to a physics graduate degree programme at Stanford University, Musk quickly dropped out and founded two technology start-ups during the “dotcom boom” of the 1990s.

These included a web software firm and an online banking company that eventually became PayPal, which was sold to eBay in 2002 for US$1.5bn.

He ploughed his fortune into a new rocket company, SpaceX – which he aimed to make a cost-effective alternative to Nasa – and a new electric car company, Tesla, where he chaired the board until becoming chief executive in 2008.

The two firms have been credited with upending their industries, even as they sometimes veered close to financial collapse.

Other business ventures include his takeover of social media platform Twitter in October 2022.

Musk’s long-term ambition is for X to become an “everything app” offering a range of services. However, the value of the firm plunged from the US$44bn he originally paid to just US$9.4bn, according to some estimates.

Some companies left the platform.

Reports suggested hate speech on X grew under Musk’s tenure, and some firms don’t want to be associated with that.

He also has ambitions in the AI sector, being an early investor in ChatGPT’s parent company before parting ways in 2018, and setting up his own company xAI “to understand the true nature of the universe” in 2023.

In February 2024, he sued OpenAI and its boss Sam Altman, saying the firm he helped found had reneged on its non-profit, open source origins by hitching its wagon to Microsoft.

However, in May 2026, a California jury tossed out Musk’s lawsuit, saying he had waited too long to file it.

In a 2015 biography, author Ashlee Vance described Musk as “a confrontational know-it-all” with an “abundant ego”.

But he also called him an awkward dancer and diffident public speaker.

In the press, he’s been dubbed both a mad genius and X’s biggest troll – known as much for his lofty ambitions as his petty fights, not to mention the more serious lawsuits he and his companies have faced from regulators, investors and others over issues such as racial discrimination and the trustworthiness of his claims.

Divorced three times – twice from the same woman, British actress Talulah Riley – Musk is frank about his faults.

“If you list my sins, I sound like the worst person on Earth,” he said in a TED interview in 2022.

“But if you put those against the things I’ve done right, it makes much more sense.”

            What is Elon Musk’s net worth?

Those contradictions certainly haven’t stopped Musk from amassing a fortune.

In October 2025, he became the first person to achieve a net worth of more than half a trillion dollars, according to Forbes, which tracks the wealth of billionaires. But with SpaceX now a publicly traded company, he is poised to become even more wealthy.

The rocket-making firm raised US$75bn from financial firms ahead of its highly-anticipated initial public offering (IPO).

As a result, estimates of Musk’s net worth have soared to more than US$1tn, according to Bloomberg and Forbes.

But with much of his net worth tied up in SpaceX stock, his status as a trillionaire could change if its shares were to drop dramatically. – BBC