The World’s First Trillionaire: Why Him, And Why It Matters

Looking at Elon Musk’s status as the world’s first trillionaire, how it came about, and the broader implications.

Elon Musk became a trillionaire in June 2026 after the Initial Public Offering (IPO) of his company, SpaceX. The scale of his wealth is unprecedented and truly staggering. One trillion is a number almost impossible to conceptualise, especially when it refers to an amount in dollars. 

Technically, he is not able to access that wealth in cash because it is mostly tied up in shares in two companies, Tesla and SpaceX, but it still raises an important question: would his level of wealth be more acceptable if he was more likeable and used it more effectively, or is that amount of wealth unsettling no matter who holds it?

The average wealth of a household in the UK was £293,700 in the period 2020-2022. 1tn is 3.5m times that. In case the scale is not already apparent, another useful analogy uses time: 1m seconds ago was about six days ago, 1bn seconds ago was some time in 1995, and 1tn seconds ago was before the dawn of civilisation, during the last ice age.

In a country where average wealth is represented by a six-figure number, it can be difficult to understand how one person accumulated so much. So, how did it happen?

An IPO is when a private company offers the public the opportunity to invest in it for the first time. SpaceX’s was the largest ever, with the company’s market capitalisation – the total number of shares multiplied by the current price – exceeding $2tn on its first day of trading. Musk’s personal wealth jumped over $1tn as his stake in the company is just under 50%, but the same mechanism which propelled his fortune also reduced it below $1tn just weeks later when the share price fell by around 30% from its peak. This process highlights an important point: $1tn on paper is immense, but it can go up or down by hundreds of billions in an instant, without meaningfully affecting Musk’s wealth in practice. Why, then, does the trillionaire milestone matter so much?

In Musk’s case, I think it is symbolic. As his wealth increases, we should remind ourselves that his involvement in political discourse in the USA, UK and EU remains strong. According to YouGov, he is disliked by 62% of people in the UK, a figure unlikely to decrease as he posts incendiary content calling for violent uprising across Europe. 

I find myself wondering how his image would change if his online presence was a little more pleasant, or if he had followed through on his countless promises to fix humanity’s problems using his vast fortune. He once pledged more than $6bn to the World Food Programme (WFP) to save 42 million people from starvation if they could provide a plan on how to do it. They did, but Musk instead liquidated $5.7bn in Tesla stock and donated the money to his own charitable foundation. Although Musk’s constant pledges and lack of action are distasteful and ultimately harmful, I think they might actually be the wrong issues to focus on.

The real problem here is not that the world’s first trillionaire happens to be an obnoxious man who incites racial violence from his sofa and taunts aid organisations with billions that never arrive, but that it is possible for such a character to exist in the first place. It is unfortunate that he does not use his wealth to affect serious change, but it is truly upsetting that a single person is, on paper, worth many times more than what the UN estimated in 2025 it would take to end world hunger by 2030. 

Today, we generally take it for granted that billionaires exist, but as the word ‘trillionaire’ comes into use it is worth asking ourselves if we can accept it. Even if Musk happened to be generous and benevolent with his fortune to affect material change, it still should not distract from the uncomfortable fact that our society has allowed the power to make such changes to rest in the hands of a single person, and that they have the ability to wield it on a whim.