On June 3, according to the Wall Street Journal, SpaceX’s initial public offering (IPO) is expected to make Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire. So how rich is this technology tycoon? According to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal, Musk's current wealth is approximately US$970 billion, mainly composed of stocks. Calculating this wealth based on the average of his career, it is equivalent to earning US$992 (approximately 6,708 yuan) per second.

Analysis shows that Musk's wealth includes his pre-IPO shares of SpaceX worth $538 billion, Tesla shares worth $167 billion, and stock options in the two companies that he can exercise at almost any time, worth about $150 billion.

In addition, he has US$5 billion in assets each in the tunnel excavation company The Boring Company and the brain-computer interface company Neuralink. He also owns $104 billion in real estate, aircraft and other investments and assets, according to an estimate by wealth intelligence firm Altrata.


Musk's wealth is far ahead

Musk is currently the richest man in the world, and his wealth is far ahead of other rich people. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos currently has a net worth of $276 billion, Oracle founder Larry Ellison has a net worth of $243 billion, and Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg has a net worth of $219 billion.

Makes $3.6 million an hour

Musk, 54, co-founded his first technology and engineering company in the United States in 1995, 31 years ago. To accumulate 970 billion US dollars in this period of time is equivalent to accumulating wealth at an extremely alarming rate every year, every day, or even every second.

Detailed calculations show that Musk earns an average of US$59,492 per minute (approximately RMB 400,000), US$3.6 million per hour (approximately RMB 24.35 million), US$85.7 million per day (approximately RMB 580 million), and US$31.3 billion per year (approximately RMB 211.7 billion).

For comparison, an American household with a median income in the United States ($83,730 in 2024) would needIt would take more than 11 million years of work to earn as much wealth as Musk.


Musk makes $3.6 million an hour

However, it should be noted that the success of Tesla and SpaceX has also brought billions of dollars in returns to investors who bet on Musk, and made employees who hold stocks in these two companies millionaires.

Philosopher and economist Ingrid Robeyns once wrote that the wealth of the world's richest people has grown so fast that it is almost difficult for ordinary people to understand. She recently estimated that if Musk worked 70 hours a week without taking vacations until he was 75, he would earn an average of about $4.2 million an hour over his entire career.

Musk, of course, is known for sleeping on factory floors and rarely taking vacations. After acquiring Twitter, he said his working hours jumped from about 80 hours a week to more than 120 hours.

Can buy 2.4 million U.S. homes or 10,000 private jets

Much of Musk's wealth is tied up in his companies. He famously said in 2020 that he would "not own any real estate" and sold many properties in California, but later purchased a home in Texas.

Musk has been able to borrow billions of dollars using his holdings in SpaceX and Tesla as collateral, but most of his wealth is still "paper wealth" and not easily disposable cash.

With $970 billion in hand, Musk can buy 2.4 million U.S. homes, buy all 32 NFL teams plus all NBA teams, and still have more than $500 billion left over. He could also buy a fleet of more than 10,000 Gulfstream G700 private jets and pay five years of operating costs for all of them, including fuel.

More than most countries’ GDP

Musk's net worth has exceeded the annual economic output of more than 125 countries, including countries such as Norway, Thailand, Argentina and South Africa.

He built a fortune from scratch with ambitions in electric cars, rockets and artificial intelligence, amassing a fortune now equivalent to about 3% of U.S. gross domestic product. By this measure, he easily surpassed John D. Rockefeller, America's richest man before Musk.

A century ago, Rockefeller rode the wave of industrialization, building Standard Oil into a vast business empire and exerting influence over the railroad and pipeline industries. The monopoly was eventually broken up by the federal government.

By 1937, Rockefeller had amassed a fortune of approximately $1.4 billion, approximately equivalent to 1.5% of U.S. GDP at the time.