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Liv McMahon, Natalie Sherman, Dearbail Jordan & Osmond ChiaBusiness & technology reporters
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The Tesla boss became the first person ever to achieve a net worth of more than $500bn
Technology mogul Elon Musk, boss of SpaceX, Tesla and X (formerly Twitter), has become the world’s first trillionaire.
For some time Musk has been, or at least never far from being, the world’s richest person.
He became the first person to achieve a net worth of more than half a trillion dollars (£370.9bn) in October 2025, according to Forbes.
But in June 2026, Musk’s net worth soared past billionaire to trillionaire status after his rocket-builder and satellite operator SpaceX, which also owns X, Grok and Starlink, went public.
However, he is known for more than simply his immense wealth.
The SpaceX boss has used his social media platform to air his views on a vast array of topics, ranging from current affairs to the future of humanity.
His forays into politics have become more frequent in recent years, and include helping Donald Trump win the 2024 US presidential election, to the frustration of some investors.
Musk has since also taken an interest in UK matters – drawing scrutiny as well as criticism from some politicians, including the Prime Minister, for both his views and the way X influences the public debate and mood.
Where was Elon Musk born?
Born in Pretoria, South Africa, Musk showed his talents for entrepreneurship early, going door-to-door with his brother selling homemade chocolate Easter eggs and developing his first computer game at the age of 12.
He has described his childhood as difficult, affected by his parents’ divorce, bullying at school and his own difficulty picking up on social cues because of Asperger’s Syndrome.
At the earliest opportunity, he left home for college, moving to Canada and then the US, where he studied economics and physics at the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League college.
In a 2010 essay for Marie Claire, his first wife, Justine Musk, a writer whom he met in college and married in 2000, wrote that even before making his millions Musk was “not a man who takes no for an answer”.
“The will to compete and dominate, that made him so successful in business, did not magically shut 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 accepted to a physics graduate degree programme at Stanford University, Musk quickly dropped out and founded two technology start-ups 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 ploughed his fortune into a new rocket company, SpaceX – which he aimed 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.
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Elon Musk in 2004
The two firms have been credited with upending their industries, even as they sometimes veered close to financial collapse.
Other business ventures include his takeover of social media platform Twitter in October 2022.
Musk’s long-term ambition is for X to become an “everything app” offering a range of services. However, the value of the firm plunged from the $44bn he originally paid to just $9.4bn, according to some estimates.
He also has ambitions in the AI sector, being an early investor in ChatGPT’s parent company before parting ways in 2018, and setting up his own company xAI “to understand the true nature of the universe” in 2023.
“I’m never hugely convinced that he knows what he wants to do tomorrow,” says journalist Chris Stokel-Walker of Musk’s wide-ranging 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’s been dubbed both a mad genius and X’s biggest troll – known as much for his lofty ambitions as his petty fights, 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 trustworthiness of his claims.
Divorced three times – twice from the same woman, British actress Talulah Riley – Musk is frank about his faults.
“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 certainly haven’t stopped Musk from amassing 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 poised to become even more wealthy.
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 soared 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.
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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Elon Musk and his son X Æ A-12 in 2021. Musk, who has fathered 14 children, has called “population collapse” a bigger risk than global warming
Musk also champions digital currencies and has a hand in several other smaller companies, including tunnel-maker the Boring Company.
Musk, who wears the mantle of a workaholic proudly, has often said he’s 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.
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 was given a “golden key” by the president on his last day in the White House
Musk has recently taken a more active interest in political events in the UK.
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 criticised 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.
How many children does Elon Musk have?
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Musk is believed to have had four children with Neuralink executive Shivon Zillis
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.”
Additional reporting by Tom Espiner & Tom Gerken
