The China Mail - Will SpaceX IPO make Elon Musk a trillionaire?

Forbes magazine on Tuesday estimated Musk's net worth at nearly $835 billion, as compared with $342 billion in its annual rich list in March 2025.

He is far beyond Google co-founder Larry Page, who is second at $298 billion.

SpaceX's market debut, expected around June 12, will "all but guarantee his net worth rising above $1 trillion," Forbes said in early April, when the company first filed to list on the Nasdaq.

The valuation of the company, founded in 2002, is expected to range from $1.7 trillion to $2 trillion, up from a range that topped out at $1.5 trillion in March.

On Tuesday, platforms for trading unlisted shares valued the group at about $1.5 trillion, with an individual share going for about $129 on Forge Global (up from $53 in mid-December) and $118 on Nasdaq Private Market.

The 54-year-old Musk currently holds 12 percent of common SpaceX shares and about 94 percent of Class B shares (each one retains 10 votes), according to a filing submitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

According to AFP calculations, after the company goes public, Musk would hold about 42 percent of SpaceX capital and 79 percent of all voting rights -- or the equivalent of $735-840 billion, given the latest valuation estimates.

"Current trends are an incredible and continued centralization and concentration of wealth" in the hands of about 3,000 billionaires, William Robinson, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told AFP.

"At the top end of those billionaires, the concentration is accelerating."

- 'Tech oligarchy' -

Robinson noted that at the same time, five billion people on Earth are living below the poverty line, creating an "extreme inequality" that can spawn civil wars and other crises.

He says the "new billionaire class" -- more precisely, the "tech oligarchy" -- holds a structural power over states, economies and society that echoes the rise of Nazism and fascism 100 years ago.

In February, SpaceX took over Musk's artificial intelligence outfit xAI, which itself had absorbed the X social network (formerly Twitter) a year before.

Musk also own about 12 percent of electric car maker Tesla, whose market capitalization currently sits at about $1.58 trillion.

In mid-February, Musk said his net worth was almost entirely tied up in Tesla and SpaceX shares, and that less than 0.1 percent of his fortune was in cash.

Analysts expect to see a 2027 merger of SpaceX and Tesla, which is increasingly focused on robotics, energy and autonomous transport.

The two companies are already jointly developing some projects, such as the giant semiconductor manufacturing plant Terafab.

"We continue to believe that SpaceX and Tesla will eventually merge into one company in 2027 with the groundwork already in place for both operations to become one organization," said analysts at Wedbush Securities, noting that Tesla is a minor shareholder in SpaceX via its investment in xAI.

Musk also holds shares in The Boring Company, a tunnel construction service, and Neuralink, which is developing implantable brain-computer interfaces.

Robinson said Musk could take on an "aura of God" for some people should he become the world's first trillionaire -- but might develop a bit of a god complex himself as a result.

His net worth could balloon even more if he meets the criteria of the compensation plan drawn up in 2025 by Tesla's board of directors.

Should he meet the numerous financial and operational benchmarks, he could pocket another roughly $1 trillion over the course of 10 years.

At SpaceX, he stands to make more than $130 billion from two compensation plans -- but one of the conditions involves establishing a permanent human colony on Mars of at least one million people.

K.Leung--ThChM