And now, some heady Musk math…

Elon Musk may be America’s chief broligarch, to borrow the phrase coined by Dartmouth sociologist Brooke Harrington. But is he also about to become the world’s first trillionaire? It sure looks that way. According to Bloomberg, Elon is worth $688 billion at the moment, up $69 billion so far this year alone—twice as wealthy as Larry Page, a distant second. We have no idea how Bloomberg does its calculations, but we do know how much Elon’s stake in Tesla is worth. And with SpaceX preparing to go public, we can begin to put a number on the rest of Elon’s empire, too.

Elon owns roughly 42 percent of SpaceX, which has hired Goldman, Morgan Stanley, JPM, Bank of America, and Citigroup to lead its public offering. The company’s prospectus, which has been confidentially filed with the S.E.C., is not yet public, so there’s no way for investors to know precisely how SpaceX is performing financially or even what all of SpaceX’s businesses are. For instance, we think—as crazy as this is—that SpaceX recently acquired xAI in an all-stock transaction that valued the company at approximately $1.25 trillion, less than one year after xAI acquired X (formerly Twitter) in a deal that valued X at $33 billion (including debt) and xAI at $80 billion. (What either of these two companies has to do with SpaceX’s primary business of launching rockets is unclear, beyond the fact that they all share Elon’s favorite letter.) But we won’t know for sure if that’s true until the S-1 is filed publicly, which could be any day now.

Anyway, SpaceX’s business is manufacturing reusable rockets to shoot various payloads into space: consumer internet satellites (Starlink), government and defense satellites (Starshield), even the occasional astronaut (SpaceX has more than $20 billion of contracts with NASA). The company is planning, but has not yet launched, something called Terafab, “the most epic chip-building effort ever.” And of course there’s plenty of merch for sale on its website, which also notes that SpaceX has completed 648 missions with 609 “total landings”—the difference representing the number of rockets that blew up, returned in pieces, or were never recovered.

At the moment, the proposed midpoint valuation of the SpaceX I.P.O. is $1.75 trillion. At that valuation, Elon’s 42 percent stake would be worth around $735 billion. But the number could easily rise, given the astounding level of Wall Street hype surrounding the deal. At a $2 trillion valuation, Elon’s stake would be worth $840 billion. Of course, Wall Street designs I.P.O.s to trade up—often dramatically—so that institutional clients can sell into a rising stock. That is not the official party line, but it’s very much how highly coveted I.P.O.s tend to play out.

For Elon’s SpaceX stake alone to be worth $1 trillion, the company would need a valuation of $2.38 trillion, putting it into the same rarefied club as Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet. Is it realistic to think that the SpaceX I.P.O., if priced at the current midpoint of $1.75 trillion, would trade up by the 36 percent necessary for the company to be valued at $2.38 trillion? I don’t think that is the least bit crazy—even if the valuation is not justified by the financials. By now, we should all understand that Elon operates within his own financial ecosystem, and the valuations attached to his companies often aren’t justified by financial performance.

All that matters is what the market decides the company is worth after the stock becomes publicly traded. Bottom line: Don’t be surprised if in the days and weeks after the I.P.O. is priced—perhaps as soon as mid- or late June—Elon will have a paper net worth of $1 trillion from SpaceX alone.

But we don’t even need to make that leap for Elon to be worth $1 trillion on paper. Let’s use the current proposed $1.75 trillion valuation for SpaceX. That gives Elon a stake worth $735 billion. He also owns roughly 20 percent of Tesla, fully diluted, which has a market capitalization these days of $1.3 trillion, making his stake worth $260 billion or so—at least on paper. If he ever tried to sell that stake, it certainly would be worth less. Don’t get me started on whether Tesla is appropriately valued at $1.3 trillion. (As usual, this is not investment advice.) That battle was lost long ago. In any event, adding $260 billion to the $735 billion gets you to $995 billion—from just those two holdings.

But there’s more. Last year, remember, Tesla shareholders approved Elon’s insane new compensation package after he threatened to leave the company if they didn’t give him what he wanted. The package grants him way-out-of-the-money stock options that could eventually be worth as much as $1 trillion if Tesla hits various operational and financial milestones. As I wrote in February, for Elon to obtain all of his 12 tranches of options, Tesla would have to become by far the most valuable company on Earth—something on the order of an $8 trillion market cap—while simultaneously transforming itself into some sort of crazy robotics, robotaxi, and A.I. company, with electric cars becoming almost a sideshow.

Whether any of that happens is beside the point here, though. For accounting purposes, Tesla has already been forced to publish a “grant date, fair value” for Elon’s compensation package. According to Tesla’s public S.E.C. filings, that number falls between $87 billion and $130 billion. For ease, let’s call that another $100 billion of paper wealth. So now, we’re at $1.1 trillion, on a relatively conservative basis, without any SpaceX I.P.O. pop.

There is still more. Elon is also the “majority owner” of Neuralink, recently  valued at around $10 billion. Let’s conservatively give him another $5 billion for that. He owns around 70 percent of The Boring Company, valued in the $7 billion range, which adds another $5 billion. And we’d have to add even more if it turns out that xAI and X are not, in fact, part of SpaceX. In other words, Elon Musk appears to already be the world’s first trillionaire—albeit on paper, and not fully realized until the SpaceX I.P.O. becomes a fait accompli. That should happen within the next month or so, as long as the equity markets continue their inexplicable tear. It’s astonishing to contemplate. Talk about income inequality!

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