Elon Musk has added a further $400bn (£300bn) to his wealth just days after becoming the world’s first trillionaire thanks to a surge in SpaceX’s share price.
The space and artificial intelligence (AI) company’s shares jumped by almost a fifth on Monday and were up by as much as 11pc in pre-market trading on Tuesday.
As a result, the value of Mr Musk’s stake in the company has soared from $700bn at the time of the company’s stock market debut last Friday to $1.1tn on Tuesday.
Combined with his $290bn stake in electric carmaker Tesla and interests in other startups, Mr Musk’s worth has risen to almost $1.4tn, shortly after the SpaceX float made him the world’s first trillionaire.
It also means his net worth is now more than $1tn more than the world’s second-richest person, Larry Page, the Google co-founder, who is worth $314bn.
A rush of investor interest and a resurgence in optimism following Donald Trump’s deal with Iran mean SpaceX shares have continued to soar since its record-breaking New York debut last week.
Based on Tuesday’s pre-market price, the company is poised to overtake Amazon as the world’s fifth-most valuable public company, with a market value of more than $2.7tn.
As it stands, investors who acquired shares at the company’s $135 flotation price have made a profit of around 50pc in four days.
Huge appetite led the company to raise an extra $11bn in shares on Monday, in addition to the $75bn it raised last week.
In a sign of further expansion plans, SpaceX on Tuesday said it would activate an option to buy the AI coding start-up Cursor in a $60bn deal.
It hopes buying the company, which allows software engineers to write code with the help of AI, will give the company a leg up in selling AI tools to businesses.
Mr Musk’s AI endeavours have had limited success to date. The entrepreneur founded xAI in an attempt to take on tech giants such as OpenAI and Anthropic, but its Grok models have made limited progress in the lucrative business market and faced a string of controversies.
SpaceX bought xAI, which also owns Mr Musk’s social network X, earlier this year.
However, the trillionaire has had success in building giant data centres and renting out space to Anthropic and Google.
A major selling point of SpaceX’s initial public offering (IPO) was Mr Musk’s plan to build data centres in space, which he says could harness more energy and be more efficient.
The company’s initial public offering filing revealed he will receive extra share awards if he can successfully put data centres in space, and even more for establishing a colony on Mars.
Combined with awards linked to SpaceX’s share price, these could be worth more than $750bn.
