Elon Musk’s trillionaire status lasted less than a fortnight. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index placed his fortune at $957bn on Tuesday, down from the $1.11tn peak reached in mid-June, as a broad technology sell-off punished SpaceX and Tesla shares alike.
The descent was swift. Just two days before SpaceX’s 12 June IPO, Musk’s wealth stood at $696bn. The listing sent it skyward: on the Monday following the debut, his fortune rose by $164bn in a single session, more than Warren Buffett’s entire net worth at the time, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index data cited by the World Socialist Web Site.
By 16 June, SpaceX shares had touched $225.64 and Musk’s net worth had reached $1.32tn, cementing his place as the first person in recorded financial history to breach the thirteen-figure mark. The company’s IPO, priced at $135 per share, opened at $150 and valued the rocket and satellite business at more than $1.77tn on debut, according to the SpaceX 8-K filing.
How Musk Lost Trillionaire Status in Under Two Weeks
The reversal came quickly. Doubts about the long-term economics of artificial intelligence infrastructure, stubborn interest rates, and swelling capital expenditure at the big technology groups triggered a broad sell-off that hit Nvidia, Intel, and AMD hard. SpaceX bore the sharpest correction: shares fell more than 30% from their mid-June peak to trade around $156.
On 22 June alone, a 16% single-day drop erased an estimated $240bn from Musk’s personal balance sheet. Tesla compounded the damage, sliding nearly 6% the following day. Musk owns roughly 12% of Tesla’s outstanding shares.
The speed and scale of these swings reflect something deeper than ordinary post-IPO volatility. Musk’s fortune is almost entirely tied to two equities: SpaceX accounts for nearly 80% of his total net worth, with his 4.76 billion shares of the company central to the calculation, per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The mechanics of his wealth also involve a now-resolved wrinkle: in May 2026, a $45bn liability associated with his SpaceX stake was removed from the Bloomberg calculation following the release of the prospectus, which produced a corresponding jump in his stated net worth before the IPO had even priced.
Then at listing, the valuation of his stake at the offering price contributed roughly $274bn to his net worth calculation, per Bloomberg data.
The Pledged Shares That Add Another Layer of Risk
Tesla carries its own structural complication. According to SpaceX’s 2025 proxy statement, Musk had pledged 57% of his Tesla shares as collateral for personal borrowing. That means a sustained slide in Tesla does not merely reduce paper wealth; it tightens the collateral cushion underpinning real debt obligations.
The concentration risk has not gone unnoticed. ‘For a stock like SpaceX, a lot of decision making might have been emotional and based on the anticipation of huge leaps forward in space exploration and utilisation,’ said Danni Hewson, head of financial analysis at AJ Bell. ‘Investing should be something treated with clear eyes and patience, even when such huge numbers are involved.’
The underlying business does supply some foundation for optimism. SpaceX reported $18.67bn in revenue for 2025, up from approximately $14.1bn the year before, a rise of roughly 33%, according to Forbes. That growth rate is not nothing. But a company priced at more than $1.77tn on debut is not trading on 2025 revenue; it is trading on a story about Starlink dominance, Mars colonisation, and defence contracts stretching decades out. When sentiment turns, the gap between present cashflows and future promises becomes very expensive, very fast.
Oxfam noted that at its peak, Musk’s fortune exceeded the combined wealth of the poorest 46% of humanity, approximately 3.8 billion people, and had grown by more than $1 million a minute over the previous year, per World Socialist Web Site reporting on Oxfam data.
Lock-up restrictions on insider selling are scheduled to lift in late July. Once company insiders can sell in stages, additional supply could weigh on the share price. A recovery of just 6% in SpaceX stock from current levels would be enough to restore Musk’s thirteen-figure status. The question is whether July’s unlock makes that move harder to achieve before it happens.
