What I think about the World Getting Its First Trillionaire

Jun 14, 2026

With the iconic SpaceX IPO, the world has gotten its first trillionaire, in other words a 1 with 12 zeroes next to it. Public opinion obviously is mixed about it, and I wanted to give my two cents on the matter: I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing, I actually think this changes very little and here is why.

My opinion might come as stupid, especially now with income inequality being at all time high, but I have my reasons to stand by it. But first, I want us to take a moment to imagine what a trillion actually means, since humans are apparently really bad at imagining big numbers. This will make sense at the end of the blog.

let’s start with a fun one I calculated based on the measurement of a standard one dollar bill. If you have a trillion dollars in one dollar bills, and aligned them in a single line, you could cover the equator at least 3,891 times.

If you can’t visualize that, maybe you have seen the news about the new Nasa trip to the moon and the preparations it is taking, and you would know that going to the moon is especially hard because it is far. Well, with that same line you could cover that trip and back more than 200 times.

if you like thinking in time instead of distance, here is a popular one: You would need to spend 1 million dollars a day every day from 712 BC until our year just to spend all of the trillion dollars.

The point I am trying to make is that a trillion dollars is a stupid amount of money, but the fact that Elon Musk has finally attained it, in my opinion, doesn’t mean much for the average joe, including me. Let’s first break some misconceptions. In our capitalistic-based society, the total amount of wealth is not fixed, thus someone getting richer does not inherently make everybody poorer. Sure, it might increase income disparity, but it doesn’t make your purchasing power weaker bar something crazy going on.

Most of This Money Doesn’t Really Exist

and for the second point, which is the meat of this article: most of the SpaceX money is purely virtual. Elon Musk attaining this status was by multiplying the shares of SpaceX that he owns by their current price, but this does not mean that Elon Musk has a trillion dollars at his disposal.

if we go for the extreme example, where Elon wakes up one day and decides to sell all of his shares, at some point, there are not gonna be enough buyers, and SpaceX’s price will drop to 0 before he is even done. This is called liquidity, and it is a real constraint that people seem to forget about when they talk about billionaires’ net worths.

in fact, reports say that less than 0.1% of Musk’s net worth is actual cash. That is around 850 million dollars in liquid money, which sounds like a lot until you remember we are comparing it to a trillion. Over 95% of his wealth is stock, shares in Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, and other ventures. It is not sitting in a bank account somewhere. It is not money he can wire to someone tomorrow.

”Why Doesn’t He Just End World Hunger?”

this is probably the most common criticism I see online, and I get why people say it. The UN estimates that ending world hunger would cost somewhere around 45 billion dollars a year. Some estimates go as high as 330 billion dollars total to end it by 2030. When you see a headline that says someone is worth a trillion dollars, the obvious reaction is “well, why doesn’t he just fix it then?”

But the problem is exactly what I described above. That trillion is not money. It is a valuation. Musk cannot write a check for 45 dollars billion without selling a massive chunk of his companies, which would tank their stock prices, which would make him worth less, which means he would need to sell even more shares to cover the difference. It is a spiral. The money people think he has is not the money he actually has.

I am not saying billionaires shouldn’t contribute more. I am saying the framing of “he could end world hunger and chooses not to” is misleading because it treats a stock valuation like a bank balance, and those are two very different things.

He Built These Companies

the last thing I want to say is about ownership, and I think this is a selfish part of me talking. Elon Musk owns roughly 42% of SpaceX equity. He also controls about 82% of the voting power through a dual-class share structure. Some people look at that and think it is unfair or excessive.

I actually think it is fair, as much as I dislike the man. He founded SpaceX. He put his own money into it when nobody believed reusable rockets were possible. He almost went bankrupt doing it. The company exists because of decisions he made and risks he took when the odds were against him. I think it is completely reasonable for a founder to want to keep ownership and control over something they built from nothing.

this doesn’t mean founders are above criticism, or that everything Musk does is right. But the idea that someone should give up ownership of a company they created just because it became very valuable feels off to me. You don’t hear people complain when a small business owner owns 100% of their shop. The principle doesn’t change just because the numbers got bigger in my opinion.

So What Do I Actually Think?

I think the world getting its first trillionaire is mostly a symbolic milestone. The money is largely virtual. It doesn’t change what you or I can buy at the grocery store. The money was always there, it just got offloaded to the public and we got suprised. Even more so, the guy who has it can’t even spend most of it without destroying the value in the process.

If anything, I think the conversation we should be having is about tax policy, capital gains structures, and how we fund public goods, not about whether one person’s stock portfolio hit a number with twelve zeroes. Now that we have hit this symblic landmark, I think it is a sign and imperative to us to improve our taxing system for the betterment of all of us.