Elon Musk’s Rise To World’s Richest Man And Why He Could Become The World’s First Trillionaire

Half a decade ago, the name Elon Musk was far away from being a household name and like a genie locked up in a jar, the now world’s richest man seemed to have come out of nowhere. Valued at $219.9 billion, Elon Musk is an entrepreneur and business magnate. He is the Founder, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Engineer at his space company SpaceX; he is also the CEO and Product Architect of his electric vehicle company Tesla known for revolutionalizing the car world and cars as we know them. He is an early investor, the founder of The Boring Company and co-founder of neurotechnology company Neuralink and Artificial Intelligence research laboratory Open AI.

The South Africa-born American business magnate and multi-billionaire has a lot to his name and is taking over the world with the products and value that he is providing the world. Already a billionaire, predictions that Elon Musk may become the world’s first trillionaire have begun to surface. Analysts at Morgan Stanley have predicted that the 50-year-old could become the world’s first trillionaire in a matter of short years. While the billionaire is still a long way far from reaching this milestone, it is important to know that he is on the right path to attaining the milestone, and soon enough we’ll explain why…

Elon Musk became a billionaire, following the success of his electric vehicle company Tesla. His story can be described as one that went from grass to grace. He became the world’s richest man kicking off Jeff Bezos who has held the title unrivalled for a long time. While he became a billionaire majorly because of Tesla, Elon Musk may become a trillionaire in the future thanks to his space company SpaceX which is currently on the path to becoming the most valued company globally.

It wasn’t an easy journey raising Tesla to where it is today. Tesla was the original brainchild of Silicon Valley engineers Marc Terpening. The idea of Tesla was birthed in 2003 and the company had its Series A funding round in 2004 and guess who led it – Elon Musk. After the investment, he became the controlling investor and chairman of the company’s board of directors. In 2007, however, the company became quite unstable and after three CEOs failed to last in the company for more than one year, Elon Musk took on the title of CEO. According to the now billionaire, “it just made sense for me to have both hands on the wheel”. And Tesla, the way we know it today, started at that moment.

Analysts at Morgan Stanley say that clients are convinced that if Elon Musk was to become a trillionaire that it wouldn’t be Tesla that’d take him there but his space company SpaceX and this only makes sense because just like how the world woke up to an era of online shopping and e-commerce and eventually an era of electric cars, the awakening of commercial space travel is upon us. “More than one client has told us if Elon Musk were to become the first trillionaire, it won’t be because of Tesla. Others have said SpaceX may eventually be the most highly valued company in the world – in any industry”, Adam Jones, an analyst at Market Realist said adjudging Elon Musk’s current wealth to his electric company Tesla.

Founded in 2002 with the goal of colonizing Mars and providing affordable space transport, SpaceX, known fully as Space Exploration Technologies Corp, is an aerospace manufacturer, transportation company and communications corporation. The company has its headquarters in Hawthorne, California. The company is responsible for manufacturing the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch vehicles, Dragon Cargo, crew spacecraft, several rocket engines and Starlink communications satellite. Like Tesla, the company was raised from the ground up by Elon Musk and has become the multi-billion company that it is today.

SpaceX had a handful of brilliant achievements to its name. Some of these include launching the first privately funded liquid-propellant rocket to reach orbit; successfully launching, orbiting and recovering a spacecraft, being the first private company to send astronauts to orbit and to the International Space Station, etc. The company’s subsidiary communication business Starlink is another formidable company and its goal is to provide satellite internet for people around the world. In January last year, Starlink’s constellation became the largest constellation ever launched.

With SpaceX, Elon Musk aims to take humans to Mars and this dream may be one step closer following the success of the company’s Space X’s Crew Dragon.

In the near future, space travel would become possible and as easy as taking a flight from London to Boston. In what has been tagged as the “Billionaire Space Race”, space companies owned by Billionaires like Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, are looking to provide affordable fares for space travel in the future. In July, business magnate and British billionaire Richard Branson went to space alongside other passengers in his space company’s Virgin Galactic rocket plane and made the record for the first crewed test flight to space. Jeff Bezos alongside his brother Mark visited space shortly after on Blue Origin’s New Shepard. The Jeff Bezos-owned company recently completed its second successful mission to space.

SpaceX is currently valued at $100.3 billion after a recent secondary share sales, making the company one of the world’s rarest private “centicorn” – a company worth at least a hundred billion dollars and the world’s second most valuable private company standing behind China’s ByteDance and above payments company Stripe. It is pertinent to know that Elon Musk owns 48 percent of SpaceX.

With the future looking towards an era of commercial space travel, companies like SpaceX stand a lot to gain. SpaceX which was valued at $74 billion in February rose 33 percent and is now valued at over a hundred billion. This growth is expected to continue as the company breaks more grounds – this translates to Elon Musk’s net worth increasing. Now, Elon Musk isn’t associated with SpaceX. He is associated with a number of potentially mega-companies. Tesla, which is one of the biggest electric vehicle brands in the world is not expected to remain stagnant. In fact, the company’s recently released third-quarter earnings show how much growth the company still has to achieve. Open AI and Neuralink are other companies that the billionaire is a part of. Bringing all these into considerations, it shatters the impossibility (if there was any in the first place) that Elon could become a trillionaire.

Elon Musk has seen his net worth grow astronomically since the beginning of 2020. In January last year, he ranked 35^th on the list of billionaires and just over a year later, he claims the title of world’s richest man after his net worth grew by over a hundred billion dollars last year. This came with the period that Tesla’s market share hit $500 billion. Elon Musk’s wealth has increased by $72 billion, a 42.2 percent increase from around this time last year, according to Bloomberg data. Elon Musk is also a major investor and advocate of Bitcoin which is expected to stabilize at a price of $175,000 by next year.

In a few years time, Elon Musk could really go on to become a trillionaire thanks to his space company SpaceX.