Elon still can’t get his money

Apparently Elon Musk doesn’t need the money. He is by far the richest person in the world today. SpaceX, his second-largest company, appears to be worth about $350 billion, and Musk owns about 42% of that. xAI, the artificial intelligence company Musk founded about a year ago, is already worth $50 billion. The point here isn’t that Musk happens to own some assets that happen to be worth a lot of money; The point is that Musk has an uncanny ability to do this generate Money. He was a little late to start an AI company, but it’s worth $50 billion. We talked about its ability to take a look at a meme asset and drive up its price. If he wants to buy a sandwich or a stock company and doesn’t have his wallet with him, everyone around him will happily give him the money. “The way finance works today,” I once wrote, “is that things are valuable not because of their cash flow, but because of their proximity to Elon Musk,” and that has only become truer.

In early 2018, when Musk was worth just a few tens of billions of dollars, the board and shareholders of Tesla Inc., his largest company, voted to give him a huge package of stock options if he met aggressive operating and valuation targets . If Musk managed to reach every milestone in the options package, the options would be worth about $56 billion, Tesla would be worth about $650 billion (up from $59 billion), and Musk available His stake in Tesla – the shares he owned before he received the option grant – would be worth about $140 billion. All of these numbers seemed unimaginable at the time: The deal stipulated that if Musk made Tesla one of the largest companies in the world, it would make him the richest person in the world.