This is an interactive article, which is supposed to be read in a browser.
As recently as the summer of 2024, Elon Musk , Jeff Bezos and Bernard Arnault were swapping the title of world’s richest person on a near-daily basis, with net worths hovering around $200 billion.
Now, not even two years later, Musk, 54, has amassed the world’s first trillion-dollar fortune, worth twice as much as Bezos and Arnault put together.
Just how rich is a trillionaire? A billion dollars is hard to grasp: enough to spend $27,000 a day over a 100-year lifetime. A trillion dollars is practically impossible to imagine — equivalent to about $27 million per day for a century.
Another way to put it: A trillion one-dollar bills stuffed under a very large mattress would weigh about 2.2 billion pounds (1 million metric tons). With a payload capacity of 100 tons, SpaceX’s massive new Starship V3 would need 10,000 flights to put that money into orbit.
In practice, a trillionaire’s wealth can’t be spent like cash. While Musk can raise billions by borrowing against his holdings, even the hint that he might sell out of SpaceX, Tesla Inc. or his other companies could be enough to crash their market value overnight.
How much is possible with Musk's $1 trillion fortune? Bloomberg News did the math and here are five ways to measure all that money.
1 Musk could purchase PayPal with just 4% of a $1 trillion net worth.
Musk’s first big success was PayPal Holdings Inc., when he got a slice of the $1.5 billion that eBay spent to acquire the company. Formed through the merger of his online banking startup with a payments company founded by Peter Thiel and others, PayPal’s founders and early employees went on to found, fund or lead some of Silicon Valley’s most influential tech companies, earning them the nickname “PayPal Mafia.” The payment company’s current market value of less than $40 billion means a trillionaire could buy the company more than 25 times over.
2 Musk could buy every carmaker in the US, Europe and Japan.
When Musk first appeared on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index , the catalyst was Tesla. The carmaker’s revenues jumped five-fold in 2013 and Musk ended the year with a $7.9 billion fortune, ranked 161st in the world. More than a dozen years later, as Musk pushes Tesla into the robot business, the company is more valuable than any of its automotive rivals. In fact, the market value of every other car company in the US, Europe and Japan — think GM, BMW and Toyota — combined is around $900 billion depending on the day, less than his current fortune.
3 Musk could have funded 68 2024 US election cycles.
Musk spent $291 million helping to elect Donald Trump and other Republicans in 2024, making him the largest single donor in races that cost nearly $15 billion altogether, according to OpenSecrets estimates. At that price, $1 trillion could pay for nearly 68 election cycles. It would also dwarf the cuts Musk made while he ran Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which slashed $215 billion in federal spending by its own tally (and much less in other estimates ).
4 Musk could fund the NASA budget 41 times over.
Tesla shareholders gave Musk his first path to trillionaire status when they approved a controversial pay package last year that could be worth as much as $1 trillion if the company reaches several ambitious benchmarks . Yet it’s Musk’s other major holding, SpaceX, that ended up getting him there much faster. With $1 trillion, Musk has about $200 billion more than NASA, one of SpaceX’s key customers, has spent since its inception in 1958. He could cover the space agency’s 2025 budget of $24.6 billion with less than 3% of his net worth.
5 Musk is worth seven Warren Buffetts.
Musk’s net worth now exceeds the combined wealth of the next three names on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index: Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin , and Amazon.com Inc.’s Jeff Bezos. And as a trillionaire, Musk is worth around seven Warren Buffett s, ranked 11th on the index with a net worth of $145 billion. Of course, that gap would be significantly narrower if Buffett hadn’t donated much of his fortune to philanthropy, while Musk has retained a far greater share of his wealth.
In many dictionaries, “trillionaire” still isn’t listed as a word. Musk is quite literally shifting the terms of the debate over global wealth disparities.
Just 62 nations have inhabitants with a combined net personal wealth of at least $1 trillion, according to the World Inequality Database. If Musk were his own country, in other words, his realm would be richer than 156 other nations, including affluent Finland, oil-rich Qatar or the 58 million people of Kenya.
Musk’s fortune also gives him extraordinary power. The only comparable analogy to the possibilities created by $1 trillion today is to the Gilded-Age fortune of John D. Rockefeller. By pouring his wealth into philanthropy around the globe, the first billionaire changed the world in profound ways : Rockefeller money founded national parks and world-class museums and universities, revolutionized medical research and helped enshrine Prohibition in the US Constitution.
For now, Musk seems less focused on life on Earth than on reshaping the future of the solar system. SpaceX’s IPO filing spells out a huge potential payout to Musk with benchmarks that include “a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants.” The value of that package? Another $760 billion .
Read More:
SpaceX Shares Jump in First Day Following Record $75 Billion IPO ·
Elon Musk Becomes World’s First Trillionaire After SpaceX IPO ·
SpaceX IPO Demands Trust in Musk’s Entangled Empire
How SpaceX’s Dream of a Record-Breaking IPO Stacks Up