Musk becomes first trillionaire as SpaceX shares jump after IPO

In a post on the social media platform he owns, Elon Musk recently lamented, ‘‘Whoever said ‘money can’t buy happiness’ really knew what they were talking about.’’

- Bloomberg

Now the world’s richest person can put that maxim to an even bigger test as he adds a new title: world’s first trillionaire.

SpaceX shares opened at $150 each, 11% above their offering price after they began trading in New York on Friday, valuing the rocket and AI-company Musk founded at roughly $2 trillion. His fortune now stands at the once-unimaginable figure of almost $1.05 trillion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That’s more than three times that of the world’s second-richest person, Google co-founder Larry Page.

It was less than 10 years ago that Bloomberg’s wealth index registered its first fortune of more than $100 billion — a milestone Musk blew past in 2020. He has since come to dominate the ranks of the world’s richest, first as Tesla Inc. evolved into one of the all-time best performing stocks and later as investors scrambled for a piece of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as SpaceX is formally known, now among the world’s most valuable companies.

A trillion-dollar fortune — roughly equivalent to Switzerland’s gross domestic product — almost defies comprehension. Steve Cohen, who made $3.4 billion last year as the world’s highest-earning hedge fund manager, would have to earn that amount for almost 300 years before reaching a trillion.