Elon Musk is — by far — the richest individual on Earth and in Trump’s orbit.
He leads or owns electric vehicle company Tesla (TSLA), aerospace firm SpaceX, artificial intelligence startup xAI, which is intended to compete with OpenAI, brain chip startup Neuralink, tunneling firm The Boring Company, and the social media company X. He also has a nonprofit called The Foundation.
His wealth has surged since the presidential election, with Tesla shares skyrocketing and xAI and SpaceX securing new valuations.
xAI, recently raised $6 billion at a $50 billion valuation less than two years after he founded it. SpaceX is now worth $350 billion, which makes it the most valuable startup in the world, after the company and its investors agreed to buy $1.25 billion of shares from employees and company insiders.
“What’s really crazy about this is that almost no investors wanted to sell shares even at a $350B valuation! SpaceX reduced the amount of shares it bought back from employees in order to allow some new investors in,” Musk wrote last week.
According to Forbes, as of this writing, Musk is worth about $448 billion, making him —by far — the richest person in its rankings. The runners-up are Amazon (AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos ($244 billion), Oracle (ORCL) Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison ($218 billion), Meta (META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg ($215 billion), and LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault and his family ($169 billion).
