Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and Shivon Zilis, a venture capitalist, arrive at Mar-a-Lago on February 1, 2026 in Palm Beach, Florida Photo by Al Drago/Getty Images The technology mogul Elon Musk has officially become the world’s first trillionaire, with his company SpaceX beginning to trade on the NASDAQ exchange Friday after launching its IPO. Musk, clad in a leather jacket and surrounded by senior SpaceX employees, rang the opening bell Friday morning, garnering wall-to-wall coverage on CNBC.
SpaceX began trading a couple hours later, rising by 18 percent from its IPO price to $154 per share, pushing Musk over the trillion dollar hump.
Musk is CEO of SpaceX, but also of a number of other companies, including Tesla. While his plans are grandiose (SpaceX told investors “we believe we have identified the largest actionable total addressable market (‘TAM’) in human history”), his ambitions that touch the media, telecom and entertainment space are real, and he now has more wealth than any other person on the planet (and beyond) to execute on that.
SpaceX is a growing player in broadband internet through its Starlink service, threatening telecom giants like Comcast, Charter, Verizon and AT&T, and his xAI division is still developing video models through Grok, a business line of obvious interest to Hollywood. X (formerly Twitter) continues to garner attention and intends to secure more advertising and subscription dollars in the coming years.
“We’d guess the common public company mantra of under promise and over deliver was never uttered in the halls of a Musk-run company. He sets big hairy audacious goals and then pushes his organizations to work toward them, even if impossible,” Wolfe Research analyst Peter Supino wrote Friday. “We expect this stock to be in large part driven by a compelling thematic/story line where if investors believe the disruptive long-term potential then near-in valuation will be less important.”
Even as Musk has been leading his multiple companies, he has also been serving as something of a culture warrior, criticizing Christopher Nolan’s casting choices in The Odyssey and frequently targeting what he sees as “woke” policies and perspectives coming out of Hollywood.
But he is also close to some Hollywood power players, perhaps most notably Ari Emanuel, the executive chairman of WME Group, and CEO of TKO, and Larry Ellison, who is backstopping his son David Ellison’s $110 billion deal for Warner Bros. Discovery. Emanuel was an investor in SpaceX, with Page Six reporting that Bryan Lourd, Mark Burnett and Michael Kives are also investing.
Still, Musk’s enormous wealth (The Walt Disney Co.’s market cap is $175 billion, Netflix’s market cap is $340 billion) portends a new era of moguldom, one that makes the Hollywood heavyweights of its golden era look tiny by comparison, though even Musk seems to recognize the role culture plays in shifting public opinion.
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