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Thank you so much. Elon Musk just became the first
human being in history worth $700 billion.
According to the Forbes Billionaires Index, Musk's net
worth surged to $749 billion late on Friday after the
Delaware Supreme Court restored his 2018 Tesla pay package.
That package was recently valued at $56 billion, but today it's
worth $139 billion. Four days earlier, Musk had
crossed another threshold, first person ever worth $600 billion.
In the span of one week, Musk added roughly $150 billion to
his personal fortune. This is more than most countries
produce in a year. So how did this happen, and what
does it tell us about where wealth is actually going now?
The answer involves illegal ruling, a pending SpaceX FPO,
and a series of wealth milestones that no one else has
come close to touching. Today, we're going to walk
through the court decision, the SpaceX valuation, how Musk
stacks up against other billionaires on Earth, and what
comes next on the path to a trillion.
We'll be right into that after this very short break.
Now, the Delaware Supreme Court ruling dropped on Friday,
December 19th, and it changed everything.
The court reversed a lower court decision that had voided Musk's
2018 CEO compensation package from Tesla, and the 2018 deal
gave Musk options to buy another 304,000,000 Tesla shares at a
heavily discounted price. The package was tied to 12
performance milestones, and Musk hit every single one of those.
When the package was granted, Tesla was worth around 60
billion. Today, Tesla's market cap sits
at 1.6 trillion, so options granted when the stock was at
one point exercise when the stock has grown more than
twentyfold. The original $56 billion package
is now worth 139 billion, based on Friday's closing price.
Now, a lower court had thrown out that package in January
2024, and the judge called it unfathomable and said the Tesla
board's approval process was flawed because Musk controlled
the board. The shareholders voted twice to
ratify the deal anyway, and the lower court rejected the
argument, too. But on Friday, Delaware's
highest court said the remedy went too far.
We're sending the entire package, left.
Musk uncompensated for his time and efforts over a period of six
years, and the Supreme Court restored the package in full and
awarded Tesla $1.00 in nominal damages, $1.00 That is a penalty
for what the lower court called a flawed process.
Now. The ruling came just four days
after Musk crossed the $600 billion mark for the first time,
and the milestone was driven by something else entirely, SpaceX.
Now the company hit a $800 billion valuation in an insider
share sale, making it the most valuable private company in the
world. Musk owns roughly 42% of SpaceX,
and that stake alone is worth more than $330 billion.
Spacex's valuation doubled from 400 billion in July to 800
billion in December. So in 1/4, Musk's SpaceX
holdings added over $160 billion to his net worth.
Now here is how Musk's wealth compares to everyone else.
Larry Page, the Co founder of Google, is the second richest
person on earth. His net worth is around $252
billion. Musk is worth nearly 500 billion
more than Page now. That gap is larger than the
entire fortunes of most billionaires.
Musk is now worth more than the second, third and 4th richest
person combined. Larry Page at 252 billion, Larry
Ellison at 243 billion and Bezos at 239 billion together total
roughly 734 billion. Musk is at about 749 billion.
He has effectively lapped the field.
Earlier this year, Oracle Co founder Larry Ellison briefly
knocked Musk from the top spot when Oracle stock surged.
That lasted about one whole day. No one else is even close
anymore, and the trajectory is worth tracking.
When Bloomberg first added Musk to his billionaire index in
2013, he was about $4.8 billion. It's still an absurd amount of
money, but it is pocket change by his current standards.
He had $100 billion in August of 2020.
That was driven by Tesla's surging stock price as the
company finally cracked. Mass production and demand
outstrip supply, and by September 2021, he reached $200
billion. Two months later, 300 billion.
In December 2024, he crossed 400 billion, boosted in part by
optimism around a second Trump administration, and by October
2025, five, 100 billion, now 700 billion.
He added 100 billion per year on average, but the last 200
billion came in weeks. In the acceleration is insane.
Each new milestone come faster than last one.
To put $748 billion in context, consider what the number
actually represents. It is larger than the annual GDP
of countries like Switzerland, Poland, or Argentina.
It exceeds the entire market capitalization of most publicly
traded companies. Only a handful of corporations
on Earth are worth more than Musk's net worth.
Apple, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Alphabet, Amazon, and also Saudi
Aramco. That is roughly the complete
list. But Musk as an individual is
worth more than Coca-Cola, Disney, and Netflix combined.
That's just one guy. It's crazy and it's difficult to
comprehend all of this. Now everyone's asking if Musk
will become the first trillionaire.
So the math is mathing. And it says he could.
SpaceX is reportedly preparing for an IPO in 2026.
Any potential valuation of 1.4 trillion.
If that happens and Musk retains his 42% stake, his SpaceX
holdings alone would be worth over $600 billion.
Just before counting Tesla, Before counting XAI, before
counting any other assets, His AI startup XAI just closed the
funding route of $230 billion. Musk owns roughly 1/3 of that
company. Between SpaceX, Tesla, and XAI,
Musk's empire spans EVs, rockets, satellite Internet, and
artificial intelligence. No other individual holds
comparable stakes across many high growth sectors.
Simultaneously, there's also a new Tesla pay package.
In November 2025, shareholders approved a compensation plan
that could pay Musk up to a trillion dollars over the next
10 years. That's the largest corporate pay
package ever approved, and the package consists of 12 tranches
of shares that vest if Tesla hit certain milestones.
Those targets start at a $2 trillion valuation and scale all
the way up to 8.5 trillion. For reference, Tesla currently
trades around 1.6 trillion. Hitting the top target would
require Tesla to grow more than five times over the next 10
years. And if Musk hits those targets,
his ownership stake in Tesla would grow from about 12% to
roughly 25%. That would give him
significantly more voting power over the company's direction
now. Musk is now closer to becoming a
trillionaire than he is to being caught by the second richest
person on the planet. The gap between Musk and Larry
Page is $500 billion. Musk would never let that go,
and he would need to gain another 250 billion to hit a
trillion. It's possible it's half the
distance. Given the trajectory, it could
happen within the next year or two.
So with all that money and Musk and all the other billionaires,
what does it even mean? It depends on your perspective.
Musk has said publicly that he needs the money to fund the Mars
missions with Starship. He's laid it out repeatedly.
Human consciousness is good. Earth will eventually become
uninhabitable. Humanity needs to become multi
planetary and that requires vast amounts of capital.
If you accept that framing then accumulation of a trillion
dollars is just a means to an end.
But Mars colonization remains decades away at best.
Because we're going to go there and send things there first.
We have to put down the infrastructure 1st and we
haven't even done that on the moon yet, which is close by.
That's a day away, a few days away.
And Mars is the nine month jump from Earth to Mars.
We have no technology tested on the surface of Mars for people
to live there yet, so it's going to be a while.
And the Martian soil cannot support food production without
major intervention. Their engineering problems that
money alone does not solve. We have to figure stuff out and
the timeline keeps slipping away.
Musk once predicted crude missions to Mars by 2024.
Now he's saying late twenty 20s at the earliest.
So five, you know, four or five years, somewhere around there.
There's also the simpler observation worth making.
Here. We're watching wealth
concentrate at a scale never before seen in human history.
One person now holds assets worth more than the GDP of most
nations. The gap between Musk and the
second richest person on Earth is larger than the entire
fortunes of most billionaires. And whether that level of
concentration is good or bad or neutral is a question for
economists and philosophers. What is undeniable is that it's
happening and it's accelerating. Private market stock options and
tech valuations have created a wealth engine with no historical
parallel. Now, the court ruling that
triggered this largest surge is also worth sitting with.
Lower court found that Musk controlled Tesla's board and
that the board failed to disclose material information to
shareholders. Supreme Court did not dispute
those findings, simply said that throwing out the entire pay
package was too harsh. So Musk keeps his 139 trillion
or $139 billion in options Tesla plays, pays $1.00 in damages,
and the question of whether concentrated corporate power
produces fair outcomes remains unanswered.
Now Musk responded to the court ruling on X.
He said thank you for your unwavering support.
Now Tesla stock barely moved in after hours trading because of
this in the market had apparently priced in the
possibility and for Musk, the world's first $700 billion, man,
the next milestone is $1 trillion.
Hey, thank you so much for listening today.
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