Elon Still Can’t Get His Money

Obviously Elon Musk doesn’t need the money. He is, today, by a substantial margin the richest person in the world. SpaceX, his second-biggest company, seems to be worth about $350 billion, and Musk owns about 42% of it. xAI, the artificial intelligence company that Musk launched about a year ago, is worth $50 billion already. The point here is not 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 generate money. He was a bit late to launching an AI company, but it’s worth $50 billion. We have talked about his ability to glance at a meme asset and cause its price to go up. If he wants to buy a sandwich, or a public company, and he doesn’t have his wallet on him, anyone in his vicinity will happily give him the money. “The way finance works now,” I once wrote, “is that things are valuable not based on their cash flows but on their proximity to Elon Musk,” and that has only become more true.

In early 2018, when Musk was only worth a few tens of billions of dollars, the board of directors and shareholders of Tesla Inc., his biggest company, voted to give him an enormous package of stock options if he hit some aggressive operational and valuation targets. If Musk succeeded in hitting 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’s existing stake in Tesla — the shares that he owned before he got the options grant — would be worth about $140 billion. All of these numbers seemed, at the time, unfathomable: The deal was that if Musk made Tesla one of the largest companies in the world, it would make him the richest person in the world.