Elon Musk is no stranger to setting absolutely astonishing wealth records, but what has happened over the last week has been another level of absolutely astonishing. One week ago, Elon Musk was worth $260 billion. As I type this article, Monday, November 11, at 3:30 PST, Elon's net worth is $336 billion. That's a $76 billion gain. A $76 billion fortune on its own would be the 20th-largest fortune on the planet.
Perhaps most impressive of all, at his current level, Elon is just $4 billion away from re-breaking his own record for controlling the largest fortune in human history.
(Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue)
In case you missed our previous coverage, Elon's recent wealth surge has come thanks largely to his deep support of Donald Trump's successful Presidential campaign. Elon spent $130 million of his own money to help get Donald re-elected. Perhaps understandably, Wall Street and regular retail stock investors believe Elon and his various companies will be richly rewarded by the upcoming Trump administration. Elon started last week with a net worth of $260 billion and ended with a net worth of $315 billion.
Disclosure: Today, I bought some shares of Tesla. I could not resist the FOMO. I paid $349 a share. I had the idea to do this on the day after the election, but I lost my nerve. Had I done that, I could have bought for around $280 a share and would already be enjoying a 25% paper gain on my investment. This article is not investment advice. It makes ZERO sense buying Tesla at this price. But also FOMO.
Richest Person in History
John D. Rockefeller was generally considered the richest person in history for most of the last century. Rockefeller's net worth exactly 100 years ago, in 1924, was around $2 billion. If you use any common internet inflation calculator, it will tell you that $2 billion in 1924 is worth the same as around $36 billion in today's dollars. But it's a bit more complicated than that.
Standard inflation calculators track consumer price changes. That's helpful when reaching back a few years or even a few decades, but this method fails to capture the true magnitude of Rockefeller's economic power from a hundred years ago.
A more accurate method of historical wealth comparison considers the relative share of the total economy. Rockefeller's fortune represented approximately 2% of American GDP at the time—a level of economic dominance that would require hundreds of billions in today's larger, more diverse economy to match. That is why most historians have typically calculated John D. Rockefeller's inflation-adjusted net worth to be $340 billion.
Rockefeller died in 1936. No human was richer than $340 billion for the next eight decades. Rockefeller's reign came to an end in November 2021 when Elon's net worth very briefly exceeded $340 billion. During the trading session on November 4, 2024, Elon was briefly worth a smidge more than $340 billion. By the time the trading day ended, he was back below $340 billion and he never went back up. In fact, a little over a year later, Elon's fortunes dropped all the way down to $130 billion. As we mentioned in the opening paragraph, Elon's net worth as of the market close today is $336 billion. His fortune jumped $20 billion today alone. So it seems like a fairly good bet that he'll re-break his own richest person of all time record. But who knows! This article is not investment advice!
And while we're not giving investment advice and just having fun with numbers, here's an exploration of what it would take for Elon Musk to become a trillionaire.
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