How Musk Gained $150 Billion in One Week

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And once and for all, quit quitting With Apple Watch iPhone 11 or later required Elon Musk just became the first human being in history worth $700 billion, according to the Forbes Billionaires Index, Musk's net worth surged to $749 billion late on Friday after the Delaware supreme court restored his 2018 Tesla Pay package. That package was recently valued at $56 billion, but today it's worth $139 billion. Four days earlier, Musk had crossed another threshold. First person ever worth $600 billion in the span of one week, Musk added roughly $150 billion to his personal fortune. This is more than most countries produce in a year. So how did this happen and what does it tell us about where wealth is actually going now? The answer involves a legal ruling, a pending SpaceX IPO, and a Series of wealth milestones that no one else has come close to touching. Today we're going to walk through the court decision, the SpaceX valuation, how Musk stacks up against other billionaires on Earth, and what comes next on the path to a trillion. We'll be right into that after this very short break. Now, the Delaware Supreme Court ruling dropped on Friday, December 19, and it changed everything. The court reversed a lower court decision that had voided Musk's 2018 CEO compensation package from Tesla. And the 2018 deal gave Musk options to buy another 304 million Tesla shares at a heavily discounted price. The package was tied to 12 performance milestones, and Musk hit every single one of those. When the package was granted, Tesla was worth around 60 billion. Today, Tesla's market cap sits at 1.6 trillion. So options granted when the stock was at one point exercise when this stock has grown more than 20 fold. The original 56 billion dollar package is now worth 139 billion based on Friday's closing price. Now, a lower court had thrown out that package in January 2024, and the judge called it unfathomable and said the Tesla board's approval process was flawed because Musk controlled the board. The shareholders voted twice to ratify the deal anyway. The lower court rejected the argument, too. But on Friday, Delaware's highest court said the remedy went too far. Rescinding the entire package left Musk uncompensated for his time and efforts over a period of six years. And the Supreme Court restored the package in full and awarded Tesla $1 in nominal damages. $1. That is a penalty for what the lower court called a fraud. Flawed process. Now, the ruling came just four days after Musk crossed the $600 billion mark for the first time. And the milestone was driven by something else entirely. SpaceX. Now, the company hit a $800 billion valuation in an insider share sale, making it the most valuable private company in the world. Musk owns roughly 42% of SpaceX, and that stake alone is worth more than $330 billion. SpaceX's valuation doubled from 400 billion in July to 800 billion in December. So in one quarter, Musk's SpaceX holdings added over $160 billion to his net worth. Now here is how Musk's wealth compares to everyone else. Larry Page, the co founder of Google, is the second richest person on earth. His net worth is around $252 billion. Musk is worth nearly 500 billion more than Page. Now. That gap is larger than the entire fortunes of most billionaires. Musk is now worth more than the second, third and fourth richest person combined. Larry Page at 252 billion, Larry Ellison at 243 billion and Bezos at 239 billion together total roughly 734 billion. Musk is at about 749 billion. He has effectively lapped the field. Earlier this year, Oracle co founder Larry Ellis had briefly knocked Musk from the top spot when Oracle stock surged. That lasted about one whole day. No one else is even close anymore. And the trajectory is worth tracking. When Bloomberg first added Musk to his billionaire index in 2013, he was about $4.8 billion. It's still an absurd amount of money, but it is pocket change by his current standards. He hit $100 billion in August of 2020. That was driven by Tesla's surging stock price as the company finally cracked mass production and demand outstripped supply. And By September of 2021, he reached $200 billion. Two months later, 300 billion. In December 2024, he crossed 400 billion, boosted in part by optimism around a second Trump administration. And by October 2025, 500 billion. Now 700 billion, he added 100 billion per year on average. But the last 200 billion came in weeks in, the acceleration is insane. Each new milestone come faster than the last one. To put $748 billion in context, consider what the number actually represents. It is larger than the annual GDP of countries like Switzerland, Poland or Argentina. It exceeds the entire market capitalization of most publicly traded companies. Only a handful of corporations on Earth are worth more than Musk's net worth. Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon, and also Saudi Aramco. That is roughly the complete list. But Musk as an individual is worth more than Coca Cola, Disney and Netflix combined. That's just one guy. It's crazy and it's difficult to comprehend all of this. Now everyone's asking if Musk will become the first trillionaire. So the math is mathing, and it says he could. SpaceX is reportedly preparing for an IPO in 2026 at a potential valuation of 1.4 trillion. If that happens and Musk retains his 42% stake, his SpaceX holdings alone would be worth over 600 billion billion. That's before counting Tesla, before counting Xai, before counting any other assets, his AI startup Xai, just closed a funding round of $230 billion. Musk owns roughly a third of that company. Between SpaceX, Tesla and Xai, Musk's empire spans EVS, rockets, satellite Internet and artificial intelligence. No other individual holds comparable stakes across many high growth sectors simultaneously. There's also a new Tesla pay package. In November 2025, shareholders approved a compensation plan that could pay Musk up to a trillion dollars over the next 10 years. That's the largest corporate pay package ever approved, and the package consists of 12 tranches of shares that vest. If Tesla hits certain milestones, those targets start at a 2 trillion dollar valuation and scale all the way up to 8.5 trillion. For reference, Tesla currently trades around 1.6 trillion. Hitting the top target would require Tesla to grow more than five times over the next 10 years. And if Musk hits those targets, his ownership stake in Tesla would grow from about 12% to roughly 25%. That would give him significantly more voting power over the company's direction. Now. Musk is now closer to becoming a trillionaire than he is to being caught by the second richest person on the planet. The gap between Musk and Larry Page is $500 billion. Musk would never let that go. And he would need to gain another 250 billion to hit a trillion. It's possible it's half the distance. Given the trajectory, it could happen within the next year or two. So with all that money and Musk and all the other billionaires. What does it even mean? It depends on your perspective. Musk has said publicly that he needs the money to fund the Mars missions with starship. He's laid it out repeatedly. Human consciousness is good. Earth will eventually become uninhabitable. Humanity needs to become multi planetary and that requires vast amounts of capital. If you accept that framing, then accumulation of a trillion dollars is just a means to an end. But Mars colonization remains decades away at best. Because we're going to go there and send things there first. We have to put down the infrastructure first. And we haven't even done that on the moon yet, which is close by. That's a day away, a few days away. And Mars is a nine month jump from Earth to Mars. We have no technology tested on the surface of Mars for people to live there yet. So it's going to be a while. In the Martian soil cannot support food production without major intervention. They're engineering problems that money alone does not solve. We have to figure stuff out and the timeline keeps slipping away. Musk once predicted crude missions to Mars by 2024. Now he's saying late 2020s at the earliest. So five, you know, four or five years somewhere around there. There's also the simpler observation worth making here. We're watching wealth concentrate at a scale never before seen in human history. One person now holds assets worth more than the GDP of most nations. The gap between Musk and the second richest person on Earth is larger than the entire fortunes of most billionaires. And whether that level of concentration is good or bad or neutral is a question for economists and philosophers. What is undeniable is that it's happening and it's accelerating. Private market stock options and tech valuations have created a wealth engine with no historical parallel. Now the court ruling that triggered this largest surge is also worth sitting with lower court found that Musk controlled Tesla's board and that the board failed to disclose material information to shareholders. Supreme Court did not dispute those findings, simply said that throwing out the entire pay package was too harsh. So Musk keeps his 139 trillion or $139 billion in options. Tesla plays, pays $1 in damages. And the question of whether a concentrated corporate power produces fair outcomes remains unanswered. Now Musk responded to the court ruling on X. He said thank you for your unwavering support. Now Tesla stock barely moved in after hours trading because of this and the market had apparently priced in the possibility. And for Musk, the world's first $700 billion, man. The next milestone is $1 trillion. Hey, thank you so much for listening today. I really do appreciate your support. If you could take a second and hit this subscribe or the follow button on whatever podcast platform on right now, I'd greatly appreciate it. It helps out the show tremendously and you'll know. And each episode is about 10 minutes to get you caught up quickly. And please, if you support the show even more.com stage zero and please take care of yourselves and each other and I'll see you tomorrow.