Elon Musk
Source of wealth: Tesla, SpaceX
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Modules
Biography
Elon Musk cofounded seven companies, including electric car maker Tesla, rocket producer SpaceX and artificial intelligence startup xAI.
He owns about 12% of Tesla, which he first backed in 2004, and which he's led as CEO since 2008. He also owns options to acquire another 8%.
Musk led a group that bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022. He merged it with xAI in 2025 in deal that valued the combined company at $113 billion (net of debt).
SpaceX, founded in 2002, acquired xAI in February 2026 in a deal that valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion. Musk owns a nearly 40% stake.
Musk also founded tunneling startup The Boring Company and brain implant outfit Neuralink. The two startups have raised around $2 billion from private investors combined.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Elon Musk
Billionaires are often presented under the romantic myth of the 'self-made person': a narrative designed to justify opulence as the natural reward for hard work, effort, or ingenuity. However, when confronting such extreme volumes of wealth with macroeconomic reality, the meritocracy narrative completely breaks down. No individual can legitimately generate through personal effort a fortune equivalent to millions of times the average working-class salary. Capital at the top does not grow because of exceptional talent; it expands through an implacable dynamic where accumulated money works exponentially faster than people, devouring the wealth generated by productive labor.
The immense fortune of Elon Musk, linked to Technology and 'Tesla, SpaceX', has not been built in a free-market vacuum, but through rent-seeking, the use of exclusive elite influence, the consolidation of monopoly positions, or inherited wealth. Far from taking real private risks, billionaire empires structurally depend on state support through direct subsidies, infrastructure use, exploitation of R&D, public contracts, and offshore tax engineering. While this wealth is equivalent to the physical weight of 5709 tons of pure gold, the rest of the planet suffers from an artificial scarcity of basic resources. The fact that this wealth is enough to fully fund the public health system of DR Congo, a country with more than 105800000 million inhabitants for 372.5 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.