Elon Musk is one of the wealthiest people in the world. With several flourishing businesses under his belt, like SpaceX and Tesla, Musk is worth nearly $200 billion. Since it’s difficult for the average person to understand a fortune of that size, we’ve created an easy-to-comprehend rundown of how he accumulated such a huge personal wealth over the years. Read on to find out Elon Musk’s net worth.
What is the net worth of Elon Musk?
Elon Musk has an estimated net worth of $181.1 billion as of March 8th, 2023, according to Forbes’ real-time billionaires list.
How much money does Elon Musk have?
Based on Elon Musk net worth, it’s safe to say that he is earning more money in a day than the average person makes in a lifetime. Musk’s fortune has significantly increased since 2018. Five years ago, his net worth was $19.9 billion. After holding steady in 2019 ($22.3 billion) and 2020 ($24.6 billion), his worth rose to $151 billion in 2021, before skyrocketing even higher than its current value.
While it’s not unclear how much money Musk makes in a day, experts claim that his wealth is largely tied to the performance of Tesla stock. Tesla is one of the many businesses he owns.
According to GoBankingRates.com, Musk’s daily earnings for the first quarter of 2022 were estimated at $333.33 million per day or around $51.30 million per hour.
His businesses
A huge portion of Musk’s net worth comes from the earnings of his many businesses, including spacecraft manufacturer SpaceX, valuable carmaker Tesla, infrastructure services company The Boring Company, and money transfer service X.com.
Additionally, Musk co-founded the neurotechnology company Neuralink, the artificial intelligence research laboratory OpenAI, and Zip2, a provider of licensed online city guide software to newspapers. The latter was the very first business Musk founded with his brother, Kimbal.
In addition to the abovementioned businesses, Musk has also invested in a number of companies since 1995, giving his net worth a consistent bump over the years. These ventures include the artificial intelligence company Deep Mind, global neurotechnology pioneer NeuroVigil, and solar power systems developer Solar City, which was acquired by Tesla and is now called Tesla Energy. Musk has also reportedly invested in different cryptocurrencies.
Did Musk also purchase Twitter? As early as 2017, Musk expressed interest in buying the social networking site Twitter. In January 2022, he started buying Twitter shares and eventually became the largest shareholder with a 9.2% stake. When this was made public, Twitter’s share price experienced a significant increase.
In April of the same year, Musk agreed to a deal that made him a member of Twitter’s board of directors and restricted him from acquiring more than 14.9% of the company. However, shortly after, he launched a takeover bid for the entire company, offering $43 billion to buy Twitter’s stock at $54.20 per share. Despite Twitter’s board adopting measures to prevent any one investor from owning more than 15% of the company, Musk successfully concluded his bid for approximately $44 billion by the end of the month.
As the new CEO of Twitter, Musk made a series of short-lived decisions and changes that upset longtime users of the platform. In December 2022, Musk conducted a poll on Twitter asking users if he should step down as the head of the company. Over 57% of the more than 17.5 million votes supported his resignation. Musk subsequently announced his plan to resign as CEO as soon as he finds “someone foolish enough to take the job”. As of March 2023, Musk remains the CEO of the company.
Unfortunately for Musk, Tesla shares have fallen 28% since he took over Twitter, lagging behind other carmakers.
His cars
Musk’s net worth also includes the value of his car collection. Since Musk has been selling off a lot of his material possessions in recent years, it’s not clear how many cars he owns as of the moment. But according to Motorious.com, Musk owned the following electric vehicles and luxury cars at some point:
- 1978 BMW 320i
- 1997 McLaren F1
- 1976 Lotus Esprit “Wet Nellie”
- 2021 Porsche 911 Turbo
- 2006 Hamann BMW M5
- 1920 Ford Model T
- 1967 Jaguar E-Type
- 2008 Tesla Roadster
- Tesla Cybertruck Prototype
- Tesla Model X
- Tesla Model S Performance
His real estate properties
Though Musk is one of the richest men in the world, he doesn’t currently have his own home.
In an April 2022 interview with the non-profit organization TED, Musk shared that he doesn’t spend a lot of his billions on personal consumption. “In fact, I don’t even own a home right now. I’m literally staying at friends,” he said. “If I travel to the Bay Area, which is where most of Tesla engineering is, I basically rotate through friends’ spare bedrooms.”
In May 2020, Musk tweeted, “I am selling almost all physical possessions. Will own no house.” Almost two years later, in March 2022, The Wall Street Journal, reported that he made good on that promise, as he sold seven homes for nearly $130 million.
Musk revealed in a tweet in June 2021 that he was renting a home from SpaceX worth $50,000 in Boca Chica, Texas.
Was Elon Musk born rich?
Elon Musk was not born a billionaire. Born in 1971, he’s the son of Maye Musk, a model and dietitian from Canada, and Errol Musk, a South African electromechanical engineer, pilot, and sailor.
Maye and Errol divorced in 1980 when Mush was about 9 years old. After his parent went their separate ways, Elon lived mostly with his father until he left South Africa at age 17.
In February 2018, Business Insider claimed that Errol acquired a “half-share in a Zambian emerald mine, which would help to fund his family’s lavish lifestyle of yachts, skiing holidays, and expensive computers.”
But in December 2019, Elon denied the emerald mine-and-lavish-lifestyle story on Twitter. “He didn’t own an emerald mine,” Elon tweeted at the time, referring to his father. “I worked my way through college, ending up ~$100k in student debt. I couldn’t even afford a 2nd PC at Zip2, so programmed at night & website only worked during day. Where is this bs coming from?”
“This is a pretty awful lie,” Elon wrote in a follow-up tweet. “I left South Africa by myself when I was 17 with just a backpack & suitcase of books. Worked on my mom’s cousin’s farm in Saskatchewan & a lumber mill in Vancouver. Went to Queen’s Univ with scholarship & debt, then same to UPenn/Wharton & Stanford.”
Musk’s Indian friend, Pranay Pathole, joined the conversation on Twitter to share that Musk did not even have a place to stay when he started his company Zip2 and used to shower at YMCA. Pathole also revealed that Musk and his roommate turn their room into a college house into a nightclub to afford rent.
Musk confirmed this in a tweet, sharing that they charged a $5 entrance fee to anyone who would like to come into their makeshift nightclub.
How much money did Elon Musk’s parents give him?
Elon Musk didn’t inherit any wealth from his family. But his father gave him and his brother, Kimbal, $28,000 to start their first software company, Zip2.
Is Elon Musk a self-made billionaire?
Despite the seemingly undying rumors that Elon Musk inherited lots of money from his parents, especially from the earnings of the supposed emerald mine his father owned, many people, including his colleagues in the different industries he worked in, consider him a self-made billionaire.
How old was Elon Musk when he became a millionaire?
According to Business Insider, Elon Musk was 41 years old when he became a billionaire in 2012.
Who is the world’s richest person in 2023?
As of March 8th, 2023, according to Forbes’ real-time billionaires list, Bernard Arnault (and family) is the world’s richest person with an estimated net worth of $211.1 billion.
Who is richer than Elon Musk?
As of March 8th, 2023, Musk is the second world’s richest person. Bernard Arnault & family are wealthier than him. Below are the top five world’s richest men:
- Bernard Arnault & family – $211.1 billion net worth
- Elon Musk – $181.1 billion net worth
- Jeff Bezos – $117.1 billion net worth
- Larry Ellison – $112.4 billion net worth
- Warren Buffet – $ 108.3 billion net worth
Elon Musk’s education
Musk completed his primary education at Waterkloof House Preparatory School in South Africa. He then attended Bryanston High School and moved to Pretoria Boys High School where he completed his secondary education.
While waiting for his Canadian passport application to be processed, he studied at the University of Pretoria for five months. After he successfully moved to Canada, he enrolled at Queen’s University in Ontario in 1990 but transferred two years later to the University of Pennsylvania, where he completed a Bachelor of Arts in Physics and a Bachelor of Science in Economics from the Wharton School.
In 1995, Musk briefly attended Stanford University’s Ph.D. program in applied physics but left after just two days to pursue his entrepreneurial ambitions.