Technology magnate Elon Musk, who leads SpaceX, Tesla, and X (previously Twitter), has become the first trillionaire in the world.
For quite a while, Musk has been—or at least has consistently been near—the wealthiest individual globally.
According to Forbes, he became the first person to reach a net worth exceeding half a trillion dollars (£370.9bn) in October 2025.
One month later, Tesla shareholders approved a landmark pay deal potentially worth $1 trillion.
However, in June 2026, Musk’s net worth surged past billionaire status to trillionaire level after his rocket-manufacturing and satellite-operating company SpaceX, which also owns X, Grok, and Starlink, went public.
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Yet, he is recognized for more than just his enormous fortune.
The SpaceX chief has utilized his social media platform to express his opinions on a wide range of subjects, from current events to the future of humankind.
His ventures into politics have grown more frequent in recent years, including assisting Donald Trump in winning the 2024 US presidential election, much to the dismay of some investors.
Musk has also subsequently shown interest in UK matters—attracting scrutiny and criticism from certain politicians, including the Prime Minister, for both his opinions and how X shapes public conversation and sentiment.
Where was Elon Musk born?
Born in Pretoria, South Africa, Musk exhibited his entrepreneurial skills early on, going door-to-door with his brother selling homemade chocolate Easter eggs and creating his first computer game at age 12.
He has characterized his childhood as tough, impacted by his parents' separation, bullying at school, and his own difficulty understanding social signals due to Asperger's Syndrome.
At the first chance, he left home for college, moving to Canada and then the US, where he pursued economics and physics at the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League institution.
In a 2010 essay for Marie Claire, his first wife, Justine Musk—a writer he met in college and wed in 2000—wrote that even before earning his millions, Musk was "not a man who takes no for an answer."
"The drive to compete and dominate, which made him so successful in business, did not magically turn 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 admitted to a physics graduate program at Stanford University, Musk quickly dropped out and established two technology startups 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 $1.5bn (£1.2bn).
He invested his wealth into a new rocket company, SpaceX—which he intended 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 revolutionizing their industries, even as they sometimes came close to financial collapse.
Other business ventures include his acquisition of social media platform Twitter in October 2022.
Musk's long-term goal is for X to become an "everything app" providing a variety of services. However, the company's value plummeted from the $44bn he originally paid to just $9.4bn, according to some estimates.
Some companies left the platform. Reports indicated that hate speech on X increased under Musk's leadership, and some firms do not want to be linked with that.
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He also has ambitions in the AI sector, being an early investor in ChatGPT's parent company before parting ways in 2018, and founding his own company xAI "to understand the true nature of the universe" in 2023.
In February 2024, he sued OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, claiming the company he helped establish had abandoned its non-profit, open-source origins by partnering with Microsoft.
However, in May 2026, a California jury dismissed Musk's lawsuit, stating he had waited too long to file it.
"I'm never hugely convinced that he knows what he wants to do tomorrow," says journalist Chris Stokel-Walker of Musk's diverse interests. "He very much leads by instinct."
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 has been labeled both a mad genius and X's biggest troll—known as much for his lofty ambitions as his petty disputes, 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 reliability of his claims.
Divorced three times—twice from the same woman, British actress Talulah Riley—Musk is open about his flaws.
"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 have certainly not prevented Musk from accumulating 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.
Musk already sits well above wealthy tech billionaires topping rich lists, including Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg.
But with SpaceX now a publicly traded company, he is set to become even wealthier.
The rocket-making firm raised $75bn (£56bn) from financial institutions ahead of its highly anticipated initial public offering (IPO).
Speaking ahead of the launch of its shares on the US tech-heavy Nasdaq index on 12 June, Musk said he gave SpaceX "less than a 10% chance of succeeding at all" when it first started—but it was now going public "with the largest IPO ever."
Its shares began trading up over 20% from its initial listing price of $135 a share.
As a result, estimates of Musk's net worth have surged to more than $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.
He could also make a fortune from Tesla, after the carmaker's board approved a deal that could see him receive a pay package worth more than $1tn if he hits a list of ambitious targets over the next decade.
Among a list of goals, he would need to grow Tesla's value eightfold, sell a million AI robots, and another 12 million Tesla cars.
Throughout 2024, Musk was locked in a legal battle over a $56bn pay package from Tesla. In December 2024, a Delaware judge rejected his claim to it for a second time, but in December 2025, the package was reinstated by the Delaware Supreme Court.
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Musk also champions digital currencies and has a hand in several other smaller companies, including tunnel-maker the Boring Company.
Musk, who proudly wears the mantle of a workaholic, has often said he is not in business simply to make money.
"Elon only gets involved with things if he feels that they're critically important for some reason... for the sake of society or humanity," says friend and Tesla investor Ross Gerber.
What are Elon Musk's political views?
For a long time, Musk—who became a US citizen in 2002—resisted efforts to label his politics, calling himself "half-Democrat, half-Republican," "politically moderate," and "independent."
He says he voted for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and—reluctantly—Joe Biden, all of them Democrats.
But in recent years, he has backed Donald Trump, who is a Republican.
Musk officially endorsed Trump for a second term in 2024 after his attempted assassination and became one of the campaign's foremost backers and influencers.
He became critical of the Democrat party's stance on a number of issues, including the economy, immigration, and gun control—decrying many of its policies as "woke."
Musk's America Super PAC also ran a controversial $1m giveaway to voters in battleground states in the last weeks of the campaign, alongside appearing on Trump's campaign trail.
After his election, President Trump selected Musk as the self-proclaimed "first buddy" to lead a new Department of Government Efficiency (Doge).
The initiative oversaw deep—and deeply controversial—cuts to public spending.
But their friendship fell apart in a very public fashion, when an initial public clash over a tax and spending bill snowballed into the pair slinging personal insults on the social media platforms they own.
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Musk announced his departure from the White House on 28 May 2025, and not long after, the president declared their relationship was over.
However, the feud has seemingly thawed since, with Musk among tech bosses who joined Trump on an important trip to China.
Musk has recently taken a more active interest in political events in the UK.
In particular, he has used X to criticize Sir Keir Starmer's Labour government on several matters, including its response to grooming gangs and immigration.
Musk has aligned himself with prominent figures on the right of UK politics, including far-right activist and convicted criminal Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, known as Tommy Robinson.
Having previously supported Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, Musk shifted to back another MP, Rupert Lowe, as its leader in 2025.
And in 2026, ahead of local elections in England, Lowe formed a new party to rival Reform called Restore Britain. Musk threw his support behind it, writing on X: "It will win. It must win. To Save Britain."
However, his frequent posts about UK politics have also come under scrutiny from MPs across the political spectrum, some of whom have criticized his interventions as uninformed and unwelcome.
Starmer accused Musk of "trying to whip up division" over the murder of Henry Nowak in June—but Musk has used posts on X to push back on claims that he and other figures fanned the flames of any protests and riots.
A self-proclaimed "free speech absolutist," he continues to make his views on political matters in the UK and elsewhere known.
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In the past, Musk has said he sees his businesses as a form of philanthropy, because they are focused on solving major human issues such as climate change.
However, he has since moderated his views on climate change, tweeting that it is "real, just much slower than alarmists claim."
Despite his own interest in artificial intelligence, he has also been one of the most prominent figures expressing concern about the supposed threat to humanity's future that super-intelligent AIs might pose.
He has claimed that the rise of artificial intelligence, combined with a declining birth rate, could result in "not enough people" being in the world.
Musk has fathered 14 children—six with his first wife, three with Canadian singer Grimes, four with Shivon Zilis, and one with conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair.
Following the birth of his twins with Ms Zilis, he tweeted: "Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis."
Meanwhile, St Clair, who revealed she had given birth to Musk's child in February 2025, sued his company xAI in January 2026 after Grok was used to create sexualized deepfakes of her on X.
Additional reporting by Tom Espiner & Tom Gerken
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