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10 things Elon Musk can — but probably won’t — do with $1 trillion

He is the world’s first trillionaire. Here’s the good that money could do.

It’s official. Elon Musk is now the world’s first-ever trillionaire, after his rocket ship company SpaceX’s record-shattering $2 trillion debut on the NASDAQ last Friday.

With a mind-numbing net fortune of $1.4 trillion that is growing by the day, Musk is now worth more than the entire economy of Switzerland. He is more than 13 times as wealthy as Bill Gates, and if you are anywhere near middle class, he is over 11 million times wealthier than you. He’s rich enough to collectively purchase every seat for every single World Cup match, every stub in every city on Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, and every ticket at every Broadway show for the next 10 years or so, while barely making a dent in his gargantuan fortune.

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One significant caveat here: The vast majority of Musk’s wealth is wrapped up in equity in his companies, not in cash, in much the same way most Americans’ wealth is tied up in their homes. While the dollar figure has 12 zeros attached, there’d be no way for Musk to convert all or even most of it into cash, Scrooge McDuck-style, without tanking the value of the companies. (In the case of SpaceX, he’s legally barred from selling any stock for 366 days after the IPO.) Don’t feel too bad for him, though: Billionaires — sorry, trillionaires — like Musk tend to borrow most of the money they spend, rather than selling off their investments, which doubles as a nifty way to avoid paying taxes.

In other words, even if Musk doesn’t actually have a trillion dollars sitting in a vault, he still has reasonable access to an obscene amount of money, enough to easily outspend any political campaign in the US, or — as he joked on X on Monday — install the volcano lair he’s always dreamt of.

On the eve of becoming a trillionaire, Musk told Peter Diamandis, head of the Xprize Foundation — one of the few charities Musk has ever appeared to give significant support to — that he doesn’t really believe in money anymore, that AI will soon “make so much stuff” that virtually everything will be freely available, and everyone will eventually just get a universal basic income that they can spend on whatever they need.

For now, though, money is still our main means of exchange for goods and services, and Musk has access to more money than he could ever spend. And that means he has an........

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