Featured Image Credit: ANDREAS SOLARO / Contributor / Getty
Elon Musk has officially lost his trillionaire status within days of having achieved the title of being the first trillionaire thanks to SpaceX’s debut.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Musk dropped over half a billion dollars when it was updated on Tuesday (June 23), which put the X owner at $957bn.
However, he’s still the world’s richest person – just not as rich as he once was two weeks ago when the Index valuated his net worth as being a whopping $1.11tn.
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As for how he became a trillionaire for a short while, it all began on June 12 when SpaceX entered the Nasdaq exchange, with the initial public offering allowing anyone to purchase one share for $135 per share and then $150 after it began trading.
This immediately saw interest from people who wanted a piece of his company, leading to a $1.77 trillion influx.
Now, because Musk owned around 42 per cent of SpaceX, on paper, his net worth skyrocketed over the trillion mark.
On June 16, he was set at $1.32 trillion after an increase in share sales and then plummeted once investors began to sell off the shares en mass.
But it wasn’t only SpaceX that ended up losing 30 per cent, but also Tesla, which saw a 6 per cent loss just one day later.
With Musk owning 12 per cent of Tesla's outstanding shares, the financial implications also hit him.
So, why did the shares fall off so fast after initially booming?
Investors became cautious after SpaceX announced it would issue bonds to raise at least $20 billion to refinance a short-term loan.
According to Danni Hewson, head of financial analysis at AJ Bell, this may not have been the only issue.
For example, with more and more people feeling some kind of way about the rise in AI and technology, it’s easy to see how they could look at an electric car company or a space technology company and believe that they need to hop on that train – only to do a U-turn on their decision soon afterwards.
"For a stock like SpaceX, a lot of decision making might have been emotional and based on the anticipation of huge leaps forward in space exploration and utilisation, but investing should be something treated with clear eyes and patience, even when such huge numbers are involved," said Hewson per the BBC.
But Musk is still rich regardless of this change.
