Elon Musk has a net worth of around $367 billion, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index.
His net worth, which is closely tied to Tesla’s share price, received a huge boost following the news that Donald Trump had won reelection in November, as Tesla shares soared to an all-time high in December.
But the tech mogul’s wealth comes from a number of sources and it isn’t stable. Musk is currently the world’s richest person and other billionaires are close on his heels, too: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is around $109 billion below Musk, while Jeff Bezos is $14 billion behind Zuckerberg.
How has Musk’s net worth changed over time?
Musk, who was born in South Africa, moved to Canada and dropped out of a Ph.D. at Stanford, became a millionaire before he hit 30. Musk started Zip2, a website that provided city travel guides to newspapers, with his brother Kimbal Musk, and sold it to Compaq for more than $300 million in 1999. Musk, then aged 27, is believed to have got $22 million from the deal.
He went on to cofound online bank X.com in 1999. It soon merged with Peter Thiel’s Confinity to become PayPal, and the company was bought for $1.5 billion by eBay in 2002. Despite having been ousted as CEO, Musk walked away with around $165 million.
Musk cofounded space-exploration company SpaceX in 2002. In 2004, he became an investor in and the chairman of EV company Tesla.
During the financial crisis in 2008, he saved Tesla from bankruptcy with a $40 million investment and a $40 million loan. That same year, he was named Tesla’s CEO.
Musk said 2008 was “the worst year of my life.” Alongside problems in his personal life, Tesla kept losing money and SpaceX was having trouble launching the first version of its Falcon rocket. By 2009, Musk was living off personal loans.
Tesla went public in 2010, though, and Musk’s estimated net worth steadily climbed. In 2012, he debuted on Forbes’ Billionaires List with an estimated wealth of $2 billion.
In 2016, Musk set up the tunnel-digging business, the Boring Company.
The next year, he founded the neurotechnology startup Neuralink.
Musk’s net worth began a rapid ascent at the start of the pandemic as Tesla stock prices soared. Musk started 2020 with an estimated net worth of just under $30 billion and was worth around $170 billion just a year later – a more than five-fold increase in just a year. His estimated fortune peaked at around $340 billion in November 2021.
Musk also bought Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022, serving as its CEO until he stepped down in early June 2023.
The stock is known to be volatile and it’s had its ups and downs since then.
Musk’s net worth declined by $15 billion after Tesla’s “We, Robot” day on October 10 when it unveiled its highly anticipated robotaxi lineup. While the event turned heads with dancing robots and sleek autonomous vehicles offering rides to guests, it left investors with question marks surrounding the economics of the ride-hailing service.
Following a big earnings beat later that month, Tesla’s stock surged by 22%, leading Musk’s net worth to increase by about $30 billion. The morning of Trump’s reelection on November 6, which Musk heavily campaigned for, Tesla’s stock was up about 15% to $289.37 per share after the market opened. In late November, Musk broke his net worth record of about $340 billion, which had stood for over three years.
Following an insider share sale at SpaceX, which boosted the startup to a $350 billion valuation, Musk’s wealth surged again in December by about $50 million in one day, making Musk the first billionaire to reach the $400 billion mark.
His net worth has fallen by over $70 billion since then, although it’s still up from pre-election. In the months after its election highs, Tesla’s stock dropped by over 50% following a number of factors, including a vehicle sales slump, a rising Tesla boycott movement, and Musk’s stint in the US government, which some investors felt took him away from his day-in-day-out Tesla CEO duties.
Tesla’s stock rose back up following the CEO taking a step back from his role in the Department of Government Efficiency. However, it continues to have big swings. Musk had one of his single-day highest net worth losses in early June following a public spat on social media with the President, in which Trump floated the idea of having his government contracts revoked, and Musk repeatedly criticized Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”
The automaker has since met its promised June deadline for the robotaxi, and shares rose more than 6.5% the following Monday after the limited launch in Austin.
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Where does Musk’s fortune come from?
Musk’s wealth is largely dependent on Tesla shares. Though he takes no salary from Tesla, he’s awarded stock options when the company hits challenging performance metrics.
“Elon will receive no guaranteed compensation of any kind — no salary, no cash bonuses, and no equity that vests simply by the passage of time,” Tesla said in 2018 when the company announced a 10-year performance award for Musk. “Instead, Elon’s only compensation will be a 100% at-risk performance award, which ensures that he will be compensated only if Tesla and all of its shareholders do extraordinarily well.”
Investors had initially approved the $55 billion compensation plan in 2018, but a Delaware judge voided it last January on the grounds that Musk had undue influence over the package and its approval due to close ties with several board members.
At its annual shareholder meeting last June, investors voted to approve Musk’s pay package. However, the judge upheld the original ruling, and the company has since said it plans to appeal that decision.
A large part of Musk’s net worth comes from Tesla shares, while roughly over 20% comes from SpaceX stock.
The rest of his wealth comes from shares in Twitter and The Boring Company, as well as other miscellaneous liabilities.
