- Tech mogul Elon Musk has an estimated net worth of $264 billion.
- His estimated fortune peaked at around $340 billion in November 2021 as Tesla shares soared.
- Musk often trades places with businesspeople like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg for the title of world's richest person.
Elon Musk has a net worth of around $264 billion, according to estimates by Bloomberg.
His net worth, which is closely tied to Tesla's share price, received a huge boost in the wake of the news that Donald Trump had won reelection as Tesla shares soared to their highest level since the beginning of the year.
But the tech mogul's wealth comes from a number of sources and it isn't stable. Musk is currently the world's richest person and other billionaires are close on his heels, too: Jeff Bezos is $43 billion behind Musk, while Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is currently $18 billion below Bezos.
How has Musk's net worth changed over time?
Musk, who was born in South Africa, moved to Canada and dropped out of a Ph.D. at Stanford, became a millionaire before he hit 30. Musk started Zip2, a website that provided city travel guides to newspapers, with his brother Kimbal Musk, and sold it to Compaq for more than $300 million in 1999. Musk, then aged 27, is believed to have got $22 million from the deal.
He went on to cofound online bank X.com in 1999. It soon merged with Peter Thiel's Confinity to become PayPal, and the company was bought for $1.5 billion by eBay in 2002. Despite having been ousted as CEO, Musk walked away with around $165 million.
Musk cofounded space-exploration company SpaceX in 2002. In 2004, he became an investor in and chairman of EV company Tesla.
During the financial crisis in 2008, he saved Tesla from bankruptcy with a $40 million investment and a $40 million loan. That same year, he was named Tesla's CEO.
Musk said 2008 was "the worst year of my life." Alongside problems in his personal life, Tesla kept losing money and SpaceX was having trouble launching the first version of its Falcon rocket. By 2009, Musk was living off personal loans.
But Tesla went public in 2010, and Musk's estimated net worth steadily climbed. In 2012 he debuted on Forbes' Billionaires List with an estimated wealth of $2 billion.
In 2016, Musk set up the tunnel-digging business the Boring Company.
The next year, he founded neurotechnology startup Neuralink.
Musk's net worth began a rapid ascent at the start of the pandemic as Tesla stock prices soared. Musk started 2020 with an estimated net worth of just under $30 billion and was worth around $170 billion just a year later – a more than five-fold increase in just a year. His estimated fortune peaked at around $340 billion in November 2021.
Musk also bought Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022, serving as its CEO until he stood down in early June 2023.
But it's tumbled since then: Tesla stock was down 56% by the end of January 2024, slashing the company's value from over $1.2 trillion to below $600 billion.
Musk's net worth declined by $15 billion after Tesla's "We, Robot" day on October 10 when it unveiled its highly anticipated robotaxi lineup. While the event turned heads with dancing robots and sleek autonomous vehicles offering rides to guests, it left investors with question marks surrounding the economics of the ride-hailing service.
Following a big earnings beat later that month, Tesla's stock surged by 22%, leading Musk's net worth to increase by about $30 billion. The morning of Trump's reelection on November 6, which Musk heavily campaigned for, Tesla's stock was up about 15% to $289.37 per share after the market opened, the highest it's hit all year.
Where does Musk's fortune come from?
Musk's wealth is largely dependent on Tesla shares. Though he takes no salary from Tesla, he's awarded stock options when the company hits challenging performance metrics.
"Elon will receive no guaranteed compensation of any kind — no salary, no cash bonuses, and no equity that vests simply by the passage of time," Tesla said in 2018 when the company announced a 10-year performance award for Musk. "Instead, Elon's only compensation will be a 100% at-risk performance award, which ensures that he will be compensated only if Tesla and all of its shareholders do extraordinarily well."
Investors had initially approved the $55 billion compensation plan in 2018, but a Delaware judge voided it in January on grounds that Musk had undue influence over the package and its approval due to close ties with several board members.
At its annual shareholder meeting in June, investors voted to approve Musk's pay package.
According to Bloomberg, close to half of Musk's net worth comes from Tesla shares, while just over 20% comes from SpaceX stock.
The rest of his wealth comes from shares in Twitter and The Boring Company, as well as other miscellaneous liabilities.