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Probably nobody in human history has inspired more pocket-watching than Elon Musk. His combination of being the planet’s wealthiest person and incessantly doing things that evoke the question “Should anyone have this much money?” has generated lots of interest in exactly how rich Musk is at any given moment. All of the men on the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires list are the subjects of plenty of news coverage, but there’s something different about Musk. When Bernard Arnault’s holdings lose an eye-watering amount of paper value in a few days or weeks, it won’t get that much mainstream media pickup unless his losses have knocked him from No. 1 in the world. Mark Zuckerberg (the current No. 2 behind Musk) does not get tons of this personalized wealth coverage either, although there are periodic exceptions.
People really want to know how rich Elon Musk is, though, at all times. In the past five years, Google searches for “Elon Musk net worth” are many times more frequent than the same search for Zuckerberg, Arnault, Jeff Bezos, or Bill Gates, or, I would wager, anyone else. Musk has long been one of the internet’s main characters, but since he launched his bid for Twitter in 2022, he’s blown away his fellow barons in the attention economy. But in the past few weeks, as Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has unaccountably hacked away at crucial government systems, interest in his riches has gotten a fresh jolt.
It’s not just curious Googlers. It’s media outlets like Barron’s and Fortune and Bloomberg and so many more covering a rough few weeks for Tesla’s stock price. This is partly fueled by fascination from people who’d like to see him held in check. “UPDATE: tesla stock in freefall. down over 20% since the close preceding inauguration day. keep shorting and buying puts. destroy this thing,” read a viral post on the X alternative Bluesky this week. David Zipper, a senior fellow at the MIT Mobility Initiative, has argued right here in the pages of Slate that inflicting economic pain on Tesla could humble Musk. (Tesla’s stock is down about 8 percent this year but still way up since Donald Trump’s election.)
How vulnerable is Musk? It’s a surprisingly interesting question for the far-and-away wealthiest man in the world, someone who has so much money that he should in theory be inoculated against any societal consequences for his behavior. Ben Collins, the longtime NBC News reporter who now runs the Onion, recently called Musk “the poorest rich man there is.”
I would like to take this burgeoning conversation a step further and settle the question once and for all: Is Elon Musk actually rich?
The short answer will shock you: Yeah, man. Elon Musk is super-duper rich. He’s the richest guy ever!
A common refrain about Musk is that his wealth is tied up in Tesla stock, of which he owns $150 billion worth in any given month. But he’s now arguably even richer from his ownership of his private companies, SpaceX in particular, with Forbes’ best guess at his net worth coming in (today) at $393 billion. Musk couldn’t practically sell most of these holdings without taking a big haircut, but he’d still walk out with many billions of dollars. Musk and his descendants will never have to fret about ordering the guacamole at Chipotle.
The longer answer is more fun, though.
Elon Musk might be the poorest richest person in the world there’s ever been. He has way more stressors than John D. Rockefeller or Andrew Carnegie ever had. His net worth is the biggest in world history but is tied up in things that require him to remain attentive and engaged with countless projects at once, because their value depends on an association with Musk. His insatiable appetite for dominance of both government and industry will always leave him scrounging for more. (See his intense preoccupation with blocking his A.I. rival, Sam Altman, from a White House–involved A.I. deal. Even being the de facto head of the American government isn’t enough!) Lifestyle creep is a real thing, and just as finally joining the six-figure-salary club doesn’t make a 30-year-old feel rich when she’s just started paying more in rent, becoming the richest man in the world can’t be all it’s cracked up to be when that person’s goals are to have nearly unchecked power and be seen as an elite video gamer.
How rich is Musk, then? The answer is both “richer than anyone’s ever been” and “not as rich as he wishes.“ Let’s also add “not rich enough, given his circumstances, to happily go sit on an island.”
We know more or less how much Musk owns of his companies, both Tesla and all the private ones. We don’t know much about how much of his own cash he keeps on hand, but we have gotten some hints that suggest it’s not more than a few billion bucks at a time. Musk took on limited partners and took out $13 billion in bank debt to buy Twitter at the agreed $44 billion price tag. He spent a bit more than $20 billion of his own money, most of which he seemed to have taken from a sale of Tesla stock, according to a Reuters analysis. In Musk’s current bid for OpenAI for $97 billion, he’s got a long list of partners.
If Musk only has a few billion bucks around—a pity, really—he can still live like a god because banks are happy to lend him money to subsidize his lifestyle, his purchase of social media companies, or whatever else. It’s good to be in business with Musk (or, mostly it is), and Musk can avoid taxes by financing his life with loans. Banks need collateral, though, and Musk has pledged millions of Tesla shares to keep money coming in the door. Musk could sell those shares and pay back his loans whenever he wanted, but then he’d have to pay taxes on his gains, and that would be a lot of tax. Much better to keep getting lots of money and not pay a lot of tax. Musk can likely do that for his entire life and then minimize the tax his heirs owe, using a time-honored strategy known as “buy, borrow, die.”
Meanwhile, those shares would lose a lot of value if Musk ever stopped working. Musk’s association with his companies is like market pixie dust, which is why Tesla’s board of directors has bent over backwards to give him money he doesn’t need in an effort to keep him happy. Musk knows that his proximity to companies makes the line graph go up and to the right. He knows it so well that he pretty clearly broke securities law by concealing his early purchase of Twitter shares in 2022, securing a lower price before the market knew he was involved. The Securities and Exchange Commission finally sued Musk over it the week before Joe Biden left office. I have no idea if securities laws apply to Musk at this point.
If Musk sold a lot of his shares in his companies, he wouldn’t get the price that they’re worth on paper, because that price depends on him, Elon Musk, remaining a key component of these companies and continuing to appear confident in them. He would then have a large stack of money, but then the tax man would show up. He would then still have a large stack of money, but would he be comfortably the richest man in the world? If not, would he be OK with that? Would he be comfortable watching from the sidelines as the other billionaires in his cohort shape the technological and ideological wars of tomorrow? Musk does not seem like the kind of guy who is cool with other billionaires gaining that much proximity to power. (Ask Altman, the seizure of whose company has become Musk’s latest fascination.)
Certain anti-Musk fantasies are never going to come true. Tesla’s stock is not going to crash to the point that the world’s biggest banks seize Musk’s collateral and sell it, sending the stock tumbling even more and knocking Tesla out of the electric vehicle market. At no point in Musk’s life or the lives of his descendants five generations down the line will his family not overflow with wealth. But another thing that won’t happen is Musk ever finding peace. He is richer than any person has ever been, but he has trapped himself on a golden hamster wheel. If he stops running, he won’t be the sort of rich that he so clearly loves being.
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