The Numbers Come First
Elon Musk publicly acknowledged the milestone on July 24, posting '(Former) Trillionaire' on X. It was not a joke without a price tag attached. According to Forbes, Musk's net worth stands at roughly $695.7 billion — down from a $1.45 trillion peak reached six weeks earlier when SpaceX's IPO briefly made him the world's first trillionaire. The paper loss comes to approximately $750 billion, a figure that nearly equals the combined net worth of Larry Page (roughly $268.5 billion), Sergey Brin (roughly $270.6 billion), and Jeff Bezos (roughly $252.6 billion).
Musk first dropped below $1 trillion on July 1. This week alone, SpaceX shares fell an additional 4.8% on Monday to around $109.50, extending a roughly 50% plunge from the stock's June 16 high. That move pushed his net worth below $700 billion for the first time since December.
Two Stories Driving the Slide
Tesla and SpaceX are each under separate pressure. Tesla shares fell 14.5% on July 23 — the stock's worst single session in over a year — after Q2 earnings showed record revenue alongside collapsing profit. Adjusted earnings came in at $0.33 a share, well short of the $0.51–$0.54 Wall Street expected. Operating margin fell to 1.4% from 4.1% a year earlier, squeezed by price cuts used to sustain volume and a 142% jump in capital spending on AI, robotaxis, and the Optimus robot. JPMorgan and Mizuho both cut their price targets following the report.
SpaceX faces a different set of pressures: two delayed Starship test launches, and a $60 billion all-stock acquisition of AI coding company Cursor that dilutes existing shareholders ahead of an August 6 lock-up expiration. Starship's 13th test flight succeeded on July 25, but the stock still hit a new low. SpaceX's first earnings report as a public company is due August 4.
X Money Launches Into the Turbulence
On July 27 — the same week his fortune was falling — Musk began rolling out X Money to Premium and Premium+ subscribers. The product delivers a digital wallet built into X: a deposit account, peer-to-peer transfers with no fees, and a metal Visa debit card tied to a user's X handle. Visa signed on as the first partner in early 2025. Musk posted 'This is money' on X at launch.
The rollout fulfills a promise Musk first outlined in a 2022 investor pitch deck, where he described X as eventually rivaling China's WeChat as an 'everything app.'
The launch also arrived days after Musk told The Economist's editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes, at Tesla's Texas Gigafactory, that money 'won't matter' by 2036 — arguing AI and robotics will eventually produce more goods and services than anyone could consume. He had made similar remarks to XPRIZE founder Peter Diamandis around the time of SpaceX's IPO, and on the podcast People by WTF he said money 'disappears as a concept' once AI and robotics can meet human needs. Tech investor Vinod Khosla, writing in Fortune, pushed back, arguing the prediction holds only if politics allows that abundance to be shared.
CEO Times Read
The irony is rich but the business logic is not irrational. Whatever Musk believes about money's long-run irrelevance, X Money is a real product targeting a real market: the peer-to-peer payments space that PayPal, Venmo, and Cash App have dominated for years. A no-fee wallet tied to a social platform with hundreds of millions of users is a credible entry, and Visa's partnership signals institutional confidence in the rails.
The harder question is valuation discipline. SpaceX's $60 billion all-stock Cursor deal dilutes shareholders at a moment when the lock-up clock is ticking and earnings have yet to be proven in public markets. Capital rewards clear rules and predictable cash flows — not paper wealth built on a single IPO pop. The August 4 earnings report will be the market's first real verdict on whether SpaceX's fundamentals justify the ambition.
