Topline
Elon Musk on Wednesday lost his trillionaire status as sliding SpaceX shares lowered his fortune by more than $50 billion, the latest stock decline for the rocket maker despite newfound optimism from one of the best-known analysts of Musk’s Tesla.
A well-known analyst of Musk’s Tesla offered a bullish take for the rocket maker.
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Key Facts
Shares of SpaceX dropped 6.2% as of Wednesday afternoon, a reversal from the nearly 12% jump over the three previous trading sessions.
Another decrease in SpaceX’s share price cut Musk’s net worth by $59 billion to $994.1 billion, as Musk holds 4.8 billion SpaceX shares and another 350 million stock options with an exercise price of $8.40 per share.
The world’s richest person still ranks well above Google cofounders Larry Page ($292.7 billion) and Sergey Brin ($270 billion), who rank as the second- and third-richest, respectively.
Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives, who is consistently bullish for Tesla, initiated his firm’s coverage of SpaceX on Wednesday, calling the company “one of the most differentiated assets within the tech market.”
Wedbush Securities set a $190 price target for SpaceX shares, as Ives wrote Musk’s firm is “well-positioned to become a major hyperscaler” across connectivity, rocket launches and AI infrastructure.
tangent
Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth swelled $19.1 billion Wednesday to $212.6 billion as Meta shares soared more than 10%. The surge followed a Bloomberg report indicating Meta was developing plans to establish a cloud infrastructure business that would sell access to AI computing power and models as a potential competitor to Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
key background
Musk’s fortune has hovered around the trillion-dollar threshold as SpaceX shares have whipsawed in their first few weeks of trading. His net worth briefly peaked at $1.45 trillion a week after the rocket maker’s historic initial public offering last month, but plummeting share prices erased more than $300 billion from Musk’s net worth. Musk, who has held the world’s richest person title since May 2024, lost his trillionaire status last week after Forbes removed $116 billion of Musk’s restricted Tesla stock from estimates of his net worth. That came after Tesla replaced Musk’s 2018 CEO performance award with a new one that pays out only if Musk remains in a senior leadership role through January 2028.