Elon Musk becomes world's first half-trillionaire
The rise has been driven by a sharp increase in the value of his electric car company Tesla.
Half a trillion in equity is so unfathomable in my reality.
$500,000,000,000
Let’s say I ask him for 0.001% of his wealth… I would get $5,000,000.
Now let’s put this into perspective of my reality. If I had $1000 and someone asked me for the same 0.001% of my wealth, I would be handing over $0.01.
One cent.
I understand that this wouldn’t be sustainable if I give everyone one cent from my pot of a thousand… but still. Have a trillion dollars makes me sick.
It’s also different having equity worth that mush vs liquid assets
I don't like him. He is a cunt.
But he is extraordinarily smart. He calls himself the Chief Engineer at Space X.
In fact, he doesn't know shit about engineering. He has no engineering degree. He just hires young engineers, make them work like dogs, and constantly takes credit for anything they achieve. Once they burnout, he kicks them out and replaces them.
He uses his celebrity to attract more young engineers. He has an entire team that visits engineering schools and tells young graduates "You have the ability to work for a genius and go to Mars. Wanna join Elon ?". Again, he knows nothing about engineering. He has a financial degree from the Wharton School of Finance.
And from his time at Wharton, he learned one extremely important lesson. Perception shapes reality.
Elon Musk presents himself as the founder of Tesla. Tesla was actually created by Marc Tarpenning and Martin Eberhard. He simply joined the company, fired them both, and sued them both. Then, he called himself the founder of the company.
In exchange of a confidential legal settlement ($$$), Tarpenning and Eberhard must stay silent. A lie repeated 50 times, 100 times, 1000 times, becomes reality. Many media outlets now call Musk the founder of Tesla. Perception shapes reality.
One of the reason he bought X is to shape the algorithm. He has urged millions of dumb people to buy Tesla stocks. And it's working. Dumb people just see random accounts on their X feed praising Elon Musk as a genius. And these dumb people actually believe it.
The same way, dumb americans on X constantly saw accounts attacking Kamala Harris during the 2024 election campaign. At no point did they find it actually suspicious ("Why am I seeing this content ?"). And it played a key role in election Donald Trump.
Reuteurs and the New York Times published two very good investigations about how Musk knowingly sold defective cars:
🔵 https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-musk-steering-suspension/
You will never guess how Elon Musk reacted. He started telling people on X :
Translation: "Please don't read quality journalism. That would be super bad for me."
This man is the living proof that technical knowledge doesn't matter in business. If you are shameless and skilled at manipulating people, you can be highly successful.
Tesla sales dropped by 60%, X is getting Empty, people mock Grock, but he keeps getting richer. It makes no sense
SpaceX lifts more raw tonnage into orbit than all other agencies and private organizations combined iirc, and directly controls an ever-increasing proportion of US government space-based assets, to say nothing of Starlink. Tesla, while sales have dropped, has not really seen a corresponding sustained drop in stock price (where most of his corresponding net worth from Tesla is actually located) in the meantime, though we will see if that can be sustained long term (I, for one, hope it falls off a goddamn cliff). As for your other point, Twitter (now X) and Grok by extension are, frankly, not a major factor in his worth, when assessed next to those other factors.
A more fitting photo
What are these numbers?