About to become the 1st trillionaire, Musk's wealth can buy countries
Elon Musk is about to become the world's first trillionaire. This is an impressive amount of wealth, never before seen in history.
Musk already owns about $270 billion in stocks and options thanks to his role as CEO of Tesla. Once shares of SpaceX - its rocket and artificial intelligence company - begin trading later this Friday (12), it would be worth an additional US$841 billion. (He would own nearly half of the shares in SpaceX, which the IPO is expected to value at $1.77 trillion in total.)
In total, this represents $1.11 trillion for Musk from his two publicly traded companies alone.
However, Musk's wealth is paper wealth, not a pile of cash in some bank. It's all subject to how investors will continue to value their companies, Tesla and SpaceX, in the future.
A trillion dollars is equivalent to a million million dollars. It would be impossible to spend that amount reasonably in a single lifetime. If someone spent $1 million every hour, every day, it would still take over a century to spend $1 trillion.
To help give you some context, here are six things that are worth (or will soon be worth) less than Elon Musk.
The economies of most countries
Worldwide, only 20 countries have economies larger than $1.1 trillion, according to the International Monetary Fund. This means that the vast majority of the world's nations have an economy that is worth less than Musk.
Among them are Taiwan ($977 billion), Ireland ($779 billion), Sweden ($760 billion) and Singapore ($660 billion), as well as Musk's native South Africa ($480 billion).
Manhattan's economy
Of course, you don't need to go abroad to find economies smaller than Musk's investment portfolio.
The island of Manhattan, home base of many of America's financial and corporate powerhouses, including Wall Street, had a gross domestic product of just over $1 trillion in 2024. (That's the most recent year for which Federal Reserve data is available.)
All Houston properties
Houston is the third largest city in the USA, behind only New York and Los Angeles. The Texan city, located on the Gulf Coast, is a hub for the country's oil and gas industry.
All of the city's real estate, both residential and commercial, is worth about $879 billion in total, according to the most recent data available.
All new vehicles purchased in the US
After homes, cars and trucks are the largest purchase made by most Americans.
The average price of a new car hit a record $48,402 across all sales last year. Still, Americans purchased 16.3 million new cars in 2025, costing a total of $789 billion.
Other technology billionaires
Musk is already the richest person in the world. But his net worth may soon leave his billionaire tech peers behind.
Even if you add in the estimated wealth of the next four richest - Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Oracle founder Larry Ellison and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos - their combined net worth of $1.09 trillion is only slightly below Musk's fortune.
Like Musk, they all made their fortunes from the shares of the technology companies they founded.
All professional sports teams
Sports teams are one of the most expensive toys that billionaires love to buy. But $1 trillion could buy virtually every sports team on the planet.
In fact, the world's 50 most valuable sports teams are worth just a third of that when combined - an estimated $353 billion, according to Forbes, which tracks sports team valuations. This includes the most valuable, the NFL's Dallas Cowboys, estimated at US$13 billion, to number 50, the NBA's Toronto Raptors, valued at around US$5 billion.
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Source: CNN