Elon Musk loses trillionaire status as SpaceX shares drop 6.2%, net worth falls to $994.1B

Topline

Elon Musk lost his trillionaire status on Wednesday as sliding SpaceX shares lowered his fortune by more than $50 billion. The decline marks the latest stock drop for the rocket maker, despite newfound optimism from one of the best-known analysts covering Musk's Tesla.

Key Facts

• Shares of SpaceX dropped 6.2% as of Wednesday afternoon, reversing a nearly 12% gain over the three previous trading sessions.
• The decrease in SpaceX's share price cut Musk's net worth by $59 billion to $994.1 billion. Musk holds 4.8 billion SpaceX shares and an additional 350 million stock options with an exercise price of $8.40 per share.
• Despite the drop, the world's richest person still ranks well above Google co-founders Larry Page ($292.7 billion) and Sergey Brin ($270 billion), who hold the second and third positions, respectively.
• Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives, consistently bullish on Tesla, initiated his firm's coverage of SpaceX on Wednesday, calling the company "one of the most differentiated assets within the tech market."
• Wedbush Securities set a $190 price target for SpaceX shares. Ives wrote that Musk's firm is "well-positioned to become a major hyperscaler" across connectivity, rocket launches, and AI infrastructure.

Tangent

Mark Zuckerberg's net worth swelled by $19.1 billion on Wednesday to $212.6 billion, as Meta shares surged more than 10%. The jump followed a Bloomberg report indicating Meta is developing plans to establish a cloud infrastructure business that would sell access to AI computing power and models, positioning itself as a potential competitor to Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

Key Background

Musk's fortune has hovered around the trillion-dollar threshold as SpaceX shares have whipsawed in their first few weeks of trading. His net worth briefly peaked at $1.45 trillion a week after the rocket maker's historic initial public offering last month, but plummeting share prices erased more than $300 billion from his net worth.

Musk, who has held the world's richest person title since May 2024, lost his trillionaire status last week after Forbes removed $116 billion of his restricted Tesla stock from estimates of his net worth. That adjustment came after Tesla replaced Musk's 2018 CEO performance award with a new one that pays out only if Musk remains in a senior leadership role through January 2028.

Further Reading

• Forbes: Musk Is A Trillionaire Again: SpaceX And Tesla Boost Net Worth By $60 Billion — By Ty Roush
• Forbes: Elon Musk Is No Longer A Trillionaire — By Matt Durot