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Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk has reached a net worth of $400 billion, according to Bloomberg.
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CNN
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The richest person in the world just hit an even higher milestone.
Elon Musk’s net worth has reached $400 billion, according to Bloomberg, making him the first person ever to cross that mark.
Behind his nearly $20 billion jump in wealth was a deal that shot up Musk’s rocket company SpaceX’s valuation to roughly $350 billion, Bloomberg reported Tuesday. SpaceX and its investors agreed to purchase as much as $1.25 billion of insider shares.
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CNN has reached out to SpaceX for comment, but the company typically does not respond to media requests.
Since the aftermath of the 2024 US presidential election, Musk has enjoyed a huge surge in his personal wealth.
An alliance with President-elect Donald Trump has pushed his ventures to the forefront. Musk is the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, as well as the owner of X and CEO of other ventures, including Neuralink, xAI and the Boring Company. Now, along with Vivek Ramaswamy, he will oversee a new “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), named after a memecoin.
Tesla shares closed at a record high on Wednesday, hitting $424.77 at market close. Musk, who is Tesla’s largest individual shareholder, has also enjoyed the stock propelling higher in part due to the broader market — NASDAQ topped 20,000 for the first time ever Wednesday. Since Election Day, the EV maker’s stock has rallied roughly 65% on investors’ belief that Musk’s influence in the Trump administration will usher in an era of deregulation that will benefit the company.
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Elon Musk attends the opening of a Tesla store in Newport Beach, California, in 2011.
From Maye Musk/Instagram
Musk, left, is seen with his brother, Kimbal, in this childhood photo posted by their mother, Maye. Elon Musk was born June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa. His mother is a model and nutritionist. His father, Errol, is an engineer.
Maye Musk/A Woman Makes a Plan
Musk is seen at left with his sister, Tosca, and Kimbal in 1976.
Maye Musk/A Woman Makes a Plan
"When Elon was young, I noticed that he read everything," Maye Musk wrote in her book "A Woman Makes a Plan: Advice for a Lifetime of Adventure, Beauty and Success." When Elon was 12, he wrote code for a video game called "Blastar" and sold it to a computer magazine for $500.
Maye Musk/A Woman Makes a Plan
Musk celebrates his 18th birthday in 1989. He would leave South Africa for Canada, where he studied at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. In 1995, Musk graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with degrees in economics and physics.
From Maye Musk/Business Insider
Maye Musk celebrates her 50th birthday party with her children in 1998. With her, from left, are Tosca, Kimbal and Elon. In 1995, Elon Musk co-founded Zip2 Corp., a company that developed online city guides. He would sell it to Compaq in 1999 for $307 million.
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PayPal CEO Peter Thiel, left, and Musk pose at the company's corporate headquarters in Palo Alto, California, in 2000. Musk had co-founded X.com, an online banking and financial services company. It merged with Continuity in 2000 and was renamed PayPal. The online payment platform was acquired by eBay in a $1.5 billion deal in 2002. Musk pocketed $165 million.
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Musk poses next to a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft in 2008. Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with the intention of making space travel cheaper and more accessible. In 2010, the Dragon became the first commercial spacecraft to orbit the Earth and return. In 2012, it became the first private capsule to connect to the International Space Station.
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Musk, bottom, watches a Falcon 1 rocket lift off in 2008. It was the first privately developed liquid-fuel rocket to reach orbit.
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In 2008, Musk became CEO and product architect of Tesla Motors. Years earlier, he had joined the electric-car company as chairman of the board, overseeing its initial round of investment funding.
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Musk walks with US President Barack Obama at Florida's Kennedy Space Center in April 2010.
Daniel Acker/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Musk is joined by his then-fiancee, actress Talulah Riley, and his twin sons, Griffin and Xavier, at a Nasdaq opening-bell ceremony in June 2010. Musk has been married three times — twice to Riley. Their second divorce came in 2016.
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Musk unveils the Falcon Heavy rocket, billed as the world's most powerful rocket, in 2011. Musk told CNN he decided to build the rocket to put bigger satellites into orbit.
Damian Dovarganes/AP
Musk walks in a procession after delivering the commencement speech at the California Institute of Technology in 2012.
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Musk appears on the late-night talk show "Jimmy Kimmel Live" in 2013.
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Musk and his then-wife, Talulah Riley, attend the Vanity Fair Oscar Party in March 2014.
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Musk represents SpaceX at a US Senate subcommittee hearing in March 2014. The hearing was to learn more about space launch programs. SpaceX had already landed a few federal contracts at that point, and Musk made his case for more.
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Musk unveils the dual-engine chassis of the new Tesla Model D in October 2014.
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Musk attends the Time 100 Gala with filmmaker George Lucas, left, and rapper Kanye West in April 2015.
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Musk guest-stars on an episode of the TV sitcom "The Big Bang Theory" in October 2015. He played himself.
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Musk has long said he wants to make humans an "interplanetary species," and in 2016 he laid out his plan to colonize Mars. He was speaking at the International Astronautical Congress, a meeting of multiple international space-exploration associations.
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Musk and other business leaders listen to US President Donald Trump during a visit to the White House in 2017.
Todd Anderson/The New York Times/Redux
Musk speaks to reporters in February 2018, a day before SpaceX launched the Falcon Heavy, the world's most powerful rocket.
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Musk and his then-girlfriend, singer Grimes, attend the Met Gala in New York in May 2018.
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Musk is seen on a television monitor on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in September 2018. Musk smoked a joint while talking to podcast host Joe Rogan about what it's like inside his head ("a never-ending explosion"), keeping a car company in business ("very difficult") and trying to get governments to regulate artificial intelligence ("nobody listened").
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In December 2018, Musk demonstrates his Boring Company's first tunnel. It was built as an experiment in underground transportation, with the aim of providing alternative routes to traffic-jammed streets.
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Musk leaves a federal court in New York in April 2019. The Securities and Exchange Commission had asked the court to hold Musk in contempt for violating an agreement that requires he get pre-approval for social-media posts about Tesla. The judge asked Musk and the SEC to go back to the drawing board and better define exactly how and when Musk's tweets need to be reviewed. The two parties were able to reach a settlement.
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Musk reveals Tesla's new electric pickup truck in November 2019. A demonstration of the Cybertruck's supposedly unbreakable windows backfired, however, when a metal ball thrown at the windows did, in fact, break them.
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Musk leaves a federal court in Los Angeles in December 2019. After a four-day trial, a jury took less than an hour to decide that Musk did not defame a British caver when he sent a tweet calling him a "pedo guy." Defense lawyer Alex Spiro said Musk's tweet "was a joking, deleted, apologized for, responsive tweet."
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Musk attends a Tesla ceremony in Shanghai, China, in January 2020. Tesla started delivering its Shanghai-made Model 3 cars to the public, the first step in Musk's much bolder plan for the world's biggest market.
From Christiana Musk/Twitter
Musk looks at his new baby boy in this tweet posted by his mother in May 2020. The baby, named X Æ A-12, was his first child with Grimes. They have since had two others. Musk also has five other children from a previous marriage, and three with Shivon Zilis, an executive at his company Neuralink.
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Musk celebrates after the successful launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the manned Crew Dragon spacecraft in May 2020. It marked the first time in history that a commercial aerospace company carried humans into Earth's orbit.
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Musk appears with Mikey Day in a "Saturday Night Live" sketch in May 2021. Musk hosted the show.
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Musk holds his son at Time magazine's Person of the Year Awards in December 2021. Time editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal described Musk as "a person with extraordinary influence on life on Earth — and potentially life off Earth, too."
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Musk attends the opening of a new Tesla factory in Grünheide, Germany, in March 2022.
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Musk attends the Met Gala in New York with his mother, Maye, in May 2022.
Elon Musk/Twitter/AFP/Getty Images
This image, taken from a video posted on Musk's Twitter account, shows Musk carrying a sink as he enters Twitter's San Francisco headquarters in October 2022. He wrote, "Entering Twitter HQ — let that sink in!" He eventually completed his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter, and he would later rename it X.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP
Musk speaks to the media in Washington, DC, after attending a closed-door gathering of leading tech CEOs in September 2023. They were meeting to discuss the priorities and risks surrounding artificial intelligence and how it should be regulated.
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Musk, wearing a black Stetson hat, visits the US-Mexico border in Eagle Pass, Texas, in September 2023. He toured the border with Texas Rep. Tony Gonzales to learn more about the migrant crisis, which he has called a "serious issue."
Kirsty Wigglesworth/Pool/Reuters
Musk attends a sit-down conversation with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in November 2023. Musk declared artificial intelligence “one of the most disruptive forces in history” during the talk in London, which dove into the dangers and opportunities of AI. “AI will be a force for good most likely,” Musk said. “But the probability of it going bad is not zero percent.”
Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images for The New York Times
Musk speaks at the New York Times DealBook Summit in November 2023. Musk, in his first interview with mainstream media since an antisemitic post on X earlier that month, apologized for what he called his “dumbest” ever social media post. But he lashed out at advertisers leaving his platform because of rising antisemitism on X. “I don’t want them to advertise,” he said. “If someone is going to blackmail me with advertising or money, go f**k yourself. Go. F**k. Yourself. Is that clear?"
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Musk visits the US Capitol in Washington, DC, in July 2024. Musk told reporters that he was a guest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was there to speak to Congress.
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Musk jumps on stage as he joins Trump during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in October 2024. No single business leader did more to support Trump’s candidacy than Musk.
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Musk speaks at a Trump rally at New York's Madison Square Garden in October 2024.
Carlos Barria/Reuters
Musk attends the America First Policy Institute gala at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, in November 2024.
Evan Vucci/AP
Musk, seen cageside at the lower left, sits next to Trump during a UFC event in New York in November 2024.
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Musk gives a tour to Trump and lawmakers who were in Brownsville, Texas, to watch the sixth test flight of Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built, in November 2024.
Thibault Camus/Pool/AP
Musk arrives at Paris' Notre Dame Cathedral in December 2024 as France's iconic cathedral formally reopened its doors for the first time since a devastating fire nearly destroyed the landmark in 2019. Trump, seen on the left, was also in attendance.
His artificial intelligence startup, xAI, also more than doubled in value in November amid a new funding round, surging to $50 billion from a few months ago, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The world’s wealthiest man is now roughly $136 billion richer since November 5, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
While the top spots on the billionaires index typically switch around, Musk is racing past his wealthy peers. As of December 10, before his wealth skyrocketed to $400 billion, he was already $140 billion richer than the second-richest man on Earth, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Musk’s record-breaking Tesla-shareholder-approved pay package, which was worth $101 billion, was rejected by a Delaware court last week.
Bloomberg’s calculation still seems to include the pay package, which is now worth as much as $120 billion based on the current value of Tesla shares.
But Musk will still enjoy his riches, with numerous ways to gain significantly more wealth in the coming years.
