SpaceX IPO Puts Elon Musk on Course to Become World's First Trillionaire

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) - A number that has never existed in the history of personal wealth is within reach of one man. Elon Musk, already the world's richest person, is poised to become the first trillionaire in human history, with a landmark stock market debut of his rocket and artificial intelligence company SpaceX expected to push his net worth past the one-trillion-dollar mark.

SpaceX is targeting a valuation of nearly $1.77 trillion in its initial public offering, which would make it the largest stock market debut in history, surpassing Saudi Aramco's 2019 listing, which raised $26 billion at a valuation of $1.7 trillion, according to Al Jazeera on Wednesday.

SpaceX filed an updated initial public offering (IPO) prospectus on Wednesday, pricing the offering at $135 per share. Musk's stake in SpaceX alone is worth $866.5 billion on paper at that valuation, according to CNBC. Combined with his Tesla holdings of approximately $355 billion in stock and options worth more than $100 billion, Musk's total wealth from just these two companies would exceed $1.1 trillion.

The Scale of One Trillion Dollars

One trillion dollars is one million million dollars, a figure that strains conventional comprehension. If a person were to spend one million dollars every hour, every day without pause, it would still require more than a century to exhaust one trillion dollars. The sum dwarfs the annual economic output of the vast majority of the world's nations.

According to the International Monetary Fund, only 20 countries on earth have economies larger than $1.1 trillion. Among those that fall below that threshold are Taiwan, with an economy of $977 billion, Ireland at $779 billion, Sweden at $760 billion, Singapore at $660 billion, and Musk's native South Africa at $480 billion. The island of Manhattan, home to Wall Street and the headquarters of some of the world's most powerful financial institutions, produced a gross domestic product of just over $1 trillion in 2024, according to the Federal Reserve.

For further scale, the total value of all residential and commercial property in Houston, the United States' third-largest city and a hub of the American oil and gas industry, stands at approximately $879 billion, according to the Houston Central Appraisal District's most recent data. Americans bought 16.3 million new cars in 2025 at a record average price of $48,402, spending a combined $789 billion on new vehicles that year. Even that figure falls short of what Musk would be worth.

Leaving All Others Behind

Musk's net worth upon the SpaceX IPO would leave his closest peers far behind. The combined wealth of the next four richest individuals, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, amounts to approximately $1.09 trillion, still slightly below Musk's projected personal wealth from just two companies.

The world's 50 most valuable sports franchises, spanning American football, basketball, soccer, and other major leagues across the globe, are collectively worth an estimated $353 billion according to Forbes, roughly a third of what Musk alone would be worth. That list runs from the Dallas Cowboys, the NFL's most valuable franchise at an estimated $13 billion, to the Toronto Raptors of the NBA at approximately $5 billion at number 50.

The IPO That Changes Everything

SpaceX was founded by Musk in 2002 as a rocket and spacecraft company, initially focused on delivering payloads to space on behalf of NASA and private clients. The company expanded into telecommunications in 2021 with Starlink, its satellite-based internet service, and in February 2026 merged with xAI, Musk's artificial intelligence company, which also includes his social media platform X, according to CNN.

The IPO would make SpaceX the world's seventh-largest company by market capitalization, ahead of both Tesla and Meta, and just behind Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC, according to Al Jazeera.

Musk will retain voting control of more than 82 percent of SpaceX after the offering, ensuring that despite the public listing, the company remains under his effective direction, according to CNBC.

It is worth emphasizing that Musk's wealth is paper wealth, not liquid cash. Every dollar of it is subject to how investors continue to value Tesla and SpaceX going forward. Markets can move in both directions, and the history of technology valuations includes episodes of dramatic retrenchment. Nevertheless, at the figures currently on the table, the threshold no human being has ever crossed is now a matter of timing rather than probability.