Trillionaire is our Word of the Week. How did Elon Musk make so much money?

How many zeroes are in a trillion? This week, many of us must have asked this question after the world got its first trillionaire in Elon Musk. The tech entrepreneur behind firms such as SpaceX, Tesla, and X is no stranger to wealth — until now, he was considered among the richest men in the world.

But it all changed when SpaceX went public last Friday. SpaceX’s initial public offering (IPO) on Thursday valued the company at nearly $1.8 trillion, up from its most recent private valuation of around $1.25 trillion. After shares opened at $150 on Friday morning in New York and kept surging, SpaceX’s market capitalisation reached about $2.2 trillion.

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This, in turn, propelled the tech titan’s wealth to unfathomable heights, with Forbes estimating his net worth at more than $1.1 trillion.

It’s for this very reason that we have chosen trillionaire — which has 12 zeroes — as our ‘Word of the Week’.

What’s the story of a trillion?

To understand a trillionaire, let’s first understand what a trillion is. One trillion is equal to one million million million. According to a BBC report, the word trillion, and its variations, were first documented by French mathematicians in the 15th Century. The word originally meant the third power of one million.

According to Etymonline.com, the word trillion came from the French trillion and from the Italian trilione. The US later adopted what became known as the short scale, which reduced a trillion to 1,000,000,000,000 (and a billion to 1,000,000,000).

How did Elon Musk become the world’s first trillionaire?

As mentioned before, Musk is no stranger to being wealthy. He first debuted on Forbes’ annual World’s Billionaires list in 2012, with an estimated $2 billion fortune, making him the 634th-richest person in the world.

From there, it only took Musk nine years to become the world’s wealthiest person for the first time in January 2021 as Tesla’s shares soared, propelling Musk past Amazon’s Jeff Bezos for the No. 1 spot.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on the day of SpaceX's initial public offering (IPO) at the Nasdaq MarketSite, in New York City, US. Reuters

Since then, Musk has only seen his fortunes increasing, with the 54-year-old acquiring trillionaire status last Friday. This occurred when shares of his rocket company began trading on the US stock market, opening at $150, signalling a new era of ultra-affluence.

SpaceX disclosures reveal that Musk owns roughly half of the company’s stock. Those Musk shares in SpaceX are worth about $867 billion at Thursday’s IPO price. But that’s not all; he also owns a chunk of shares of Tesla, pushing the value beyond the $1 trillion mark.

What can a trillionaire purchase with his money?

It can be hard to grasp just how much money is $1 trillion. In essence, $1 trillion is 1,000 billion dollars.

Picture this: Musk’s wealth as a trillionaire now exceeds the GDP of many countries. In fact, the International Monetary Fund has noted that only 20 countries have economies that are larger than $1.1 trillion.

That means the vast majority of the world’s nations have an economy worth less than Musk's. Among them are Taiwan ($977 billion), Ireland ($779 billion), Sweden ($760 billion), and Singapore ($660 billion), along with Musk’s home country, South Africa ($480 billion).

If that doesn’t help, here’s another way to understand Musk’s wealth. His net worth is more than that of the next four richest people in the world – Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Their combined net worth is $1.09 trillion, falling just short of Musk’s wealth.

Elon Musk's wealth is more than that of the next four richest people in the world. File image/Reuters

As a trillionaire, Musk also has enough money to purchase nearly 2.5 million homes in the US if one considers the average price of a house to be $403,000.

According to a Moneycontrol report, if converted into physical cash, the scale becomes even more staggering. One trillion one-dollar bills laid end to end would stretch nearly 97 million miles, enough to travel to the Moon and back more than 200 times and farther than the distance between Earth and the Sun.

As a trillionaire, Musk could also possibly wipe out world hunger. How? The United Nations estimates it would take $512 billion to lift 700 million people out of hunger and malnutrition over a six-year period.

Protesters gather against Elon Musk and his extensive wealth following the launch of the SpaceX initial public offering (IPO) on the Nasdaq. AFP

But should trillionaires even exist?

Musk’s newfound status has also ignited a debate about whether such wealth levels should even exist. American Senator Bernie Sanders termed Musk’s trillionaire status as an “absurdity”.

Even Nabil Ahmed, a senior director of economic justice at Oxfam, told TIME: “The emergence of trillionaires should obviously be cause for alarm.”

But even as this debate rages, Musk is already looking to achieve the next milestone — quadrillionaire. That’s one thousand trillion dollars. And to put that in perspective, the entire global GDP as of 2026 stands at roughly $120 trillion. A quadrillionaire would be worth more than eight times the output of every country on earth combined.

But as they say, anything is possible.