Elon Musk: A Trillionaire in the Making?

It seems like not a day goes by without billionaire Elon Musk making headlines - and in the future, we may be calling him a trillionaire.

The boss of Tesla, SpaceX, and X (formerly Twitter) is the world's richest person.

He became the first to achieve a net worth of more than half a trillion dollars (£370.9bn) in October 2025, according to Forbes, and a month later, Tesla shareholders approved a record-breaking pay deal that could be worth $1 trillion.

The planned flotation of SpaceX, which builds space exploration rockets and infrastructure but also owns xAI and Starlink, could push his net worth to about $1tn.

Musk has charged ahead with human brain chip trials at his firm Neuralink and tried to take a major role in the fast-growing world of artificial intelligence, despite warning that the tech could lead to humanity's extinction.

But he is also known for using his social media platform to air his views on a vast array of topics, particularly politics.

In early 2024, his reach expanded further after Donald Trump's victory in the US presidential election - in which the Tesla executive played a key but controversial role - before their relationship imploded in a bitter feud.

It's not just in the US where Musk has waded into political controversy - with posts and comments about current affairs in the UK, Germany and other European states frequently stoking the ire of politicians across the pond.

His foray into politics, however, appeared to come at a cost to his businesses. Analysts attributed slumps in Tesla sales in 2025 to be partly due to customers turning against Musk.

Where was Elon Musk born?

Born in Pretoria, South Africa, Musk showed his talents for entrepreneurship early, going door-to-door with his brother selling homemade chocolate Easter eggs and developing his first computer game at the age of 12.

He has described his childhood as difficult, affected by his parents' divorce, bullying at school and his own difficulty picking up on social cues because of Asperger's Syndrome.

At the earliest opportunity, he left home for college, moving to Canada and then the US, where he studied economics and physics at the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League college.

In a 2010 essay for Marie Claire, his first wife, Justine Musk, a writer whom he met in college and married in 2000, wrote that even before making his millions Musk was "not a man who takes no for an answer".

"The will to compete and dominate, that made him so successful in business, did not magically shut off when he came home," she recalled, adding that he told her while dancing at their wedding, "I am the alpha in this relationship."

How did Elon Musk make his money?

After being accepted to a physics graduate degree programme at Stanford University, Musk quickly dropped out and founded two technology start-ups during the "dotcom boom" of the 1990s.

These included a web software firm and an online banking company that eventually became PayPal, which was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5bn (£1.2bn).

He ploughed his fortune into a new rocket company, SpaceX - which he aimed to make a cost-effective alternative to Nasa - and a new electric car company, Tesla, where he chaired the board until becoming chief executive in 2008.

The two firms are credited with upending their industries, even as they sometimes veered close to financial collapse.

More recent business ventures include his takeover of social media platform Twitter in October 2022.

He dramatically reduced the size of its workforce including, controversially, cuts to teams responsible for keeping the platform safe; rebranded the company as X; and introduced new premium subscriptions so that the business did not rely on advertising alone for income.

Musk's long-term ambition is for X to become an "everything app" offering a range of services. However, the value of the firm plunged from the $44bn he originally paid to just $9.4bn, according to some estimates.

Since Musk's takeover some companies have also chosen to leave the platform in what's been termed "the great X-odus".

Reports suggest hate speech has been growing under Musk's X tenure, and some firms don't want to be associated with that.

He also has ambitions in the AI sector, being an early investor in ChatGPT's parent company before parting ways in 2018, and setting up his own company xAI "to understand the true nature of the universe" in 2023.

In February 2024, he sued OpenAI and its boss Sam Altman, saying the firm he helped found had reneged on its non-profit, open source origins by hitching its wagon to Microsoft.

However, in May 2026, a California jury tossed out Musk's lawsuit, saying he had waited too long to file it.

Musk has looked to consolidate and leverage the power of his own firms to establish a rival AI firm to OpenAI and Google.

"I'm never hugely convinced that he knows what he wants to do tomorrow," says journalist Chris Stokel-Walker of Musk's wide-ranging interests. "He very much leads by instinct."

In a 2015 biography, author Ashlee Vance described Musk as "a confrontational know-it-all" with an "abundant ego". But he also called him an awkward dancer and diffident public speaker.

In the press, he's been dubbed both a mad genius and Twitter's biggest troll - known as much for his lofty ambitions as his petty fights, not to mention the more serious lawsuits he and his companies have faced from regulators, investors and others over issues such as racial discrimination and the trustworthiness of his claims.

Divorced three times - twice from the same woman, British actress Talulah Riley - Musk is frank about his faults.

"If you list my sins, I sound like the worst person on Earth," he said in a TED interview in 2022.

"But if you put those against the things I've done right, it makes much more sense."

What is Elon Musk's net worth?

Those contradictions certainly haven't stopped Musk from amassing a fortune.

In October 2025, he became the first person to achieve a net worth of more than half a trillion dollars (£370.9bn), according to Forbes, which tracks the wealth of billionaires.

With an estimated net worth of about $726bn, according to Bloomberg, Musk sits well above wealthy tech billionaires topping rich lists, including Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg.

According to Bloomberg, if SpaceX's shares float at the planned offer price of $135 a share, Musk's net worth would rise to about $988bn.

Musk also stands to make even more money after Tesla's board approved a deal that could see him receive a pay package worth over $1tn if he hits a list of ambitious targets over the next decade.

Among a list of goals, he would need to grow Tesla's value eightfold, sell a million AI robots and another 12 million Tesla cars.

Throughout 2024 Musk was locked in a legal battle over a $56bn pay package from Tesla with a Delaware judge rejecting his claim to it for a second time in December.

Judge Kathaleen McCormick called the pay-out an "unfathomable sum", and argued Musk had influenced the company's board and shareholders - 75% of which voted to back his pay deal.

Musk also champions digital currencies and has a hand in several other smaller companies, including tunnel-maker the Boring Company.

Musk, who wears the mantle of a workaholic proudly, has often said he's not in business simply to make money - claims he repeated recently with regard to his Twitter takeover.

"Elon only gets involved with things if he feels that they're critically important for some reason... for the sake of society or humanity," says friend and Tesla investor Ross Gerber.

Why did Elon Musk team up with Trump?

For a long time Musk, who became a US citizen in 2002, resisted efforts to label his politics - calling himself "half-Democrat, half-Republican", "politically moderate" and "independent".

He says he voted for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and - reluctantly - Joe Biden, all of them Democrats.

But in recent years he backed Donald Trump, who is a Republican.

Musk officially endorsed Trump for a second term in 2024 after his attempted assassination and became one of the campaign's foremost backers and influencers.

He became critical of the Democrat party's stance on a number of issues, including the economy, immigration and gun control - decrying many of its policies as "woke".

Musk's America Super PAC also ran a controversial $1m giveaway to voters in battleground states in the last weeks of the campaign, in addition to appearing on Trump's campaign trail.

After his election, President Trump selected Musk as the self-proclaimed "first buddy" to lead a new Department of Government Efficiency (Doge).

But the friendship between the two billionaires fell apart in a very public fashion, when an initial public clash over a tax and spending bill snowballed into the pair slinging personal insults on the social media platforms they own.

Musk then called for Trump to be impeached, and said he'd decommission his Dragon spacecraft, which Nasa relies upon - something he backed down on fairly swiftly.

The president later declared his relationship with the Tesla boss was over.

How many children does Elon Musk have?

In the past, Musk has said he sees his businesses as a form of philanthropy, because they are focused on solving major human issues such as climate change.

However, he has since moderated his views on climate change, tweeting that it is "real, just much slower than alarmists claim".

Despite his own interest in artificial intelligence, he has also been one of the most prominent figures expressing concern about the supposed threat to humanity's future that super-intelligent AIs might pose.

He has claimed that the rise of artificial intelligence, combined with a declining birth rate, could result in "not enough people" being in the world.

Musk has fathered 14 children - six with his first wife, three with Canadian singer Grimes, four with Shivon Zilis and one with conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair.

Following the birth of his twins with Ms Zilis, he tweeted: "Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis."

Meanwhile St Clair, who revealed she had given birth to Musk's child in February 2025, sued his company xAI in January 2026 after Grok was used to create sexualised deepfakes of her on X.

Additional reporting by Tom Espiner & Tom Gerken