On Friday, October 2, 2026, Elon Musk got $61 billion richer between the opening bell and mid-afternoon.
Forbes clocked his fortune at $979.7 billion at 2:15 p.m. EDT, up 6.64% from the day before.
Nothing he owns was sold or bought that day. SpaceX stock rose more than 7% to $158.84 after several launches in 24 hours, and Tesla climbed about 5% to $371.32 on better-than-expected Q3 deliveries of 486,532 cars.
That is the whole trick behind the headlines.
His wealth sits almost entirely in stock so every percentage point on a ticker moves billions in his column.
Why his net worth moves like a stock chart
Musk’s fortune is a paper figure made from his stakes in two public companies.
Forbes and Bloomberg multiply his shares by the latest price and add his other holdings.
SpaceX is now the heavier side of the scale. Before the IPO he owned about 42% of the company, and it went public in June 2026 at a valuation near $2 trillion.
Tesla is the second engine, and the two often move together on the same news.
The math gets brutal at this size.
On a fortune near $1 trillion, a 5% move across his holdings adds or erases roughly $50 billion in a few hours.
Elon Musk attends the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at the Porte de Versailles exhibition centre on June 16, 2023 in Paris – @Getty
The index you read also changes the number. Forbes and Bloomberg count options, restricted stock and private stakes differently. You see now that the same day can show two different totals.
In late June 2026 Forbes removed $116 billion of restricted Tesla stock from its estimate after Musk gave up $7.1 billion in shares to cover the exercise price on his 2018 options.
The days that moved the needle before the IPO
Long before SpaceX listed, a single headline or X post can shift his fortune by tens of billions.
Tesla head Elon Musk talks to the press as he arrives to to have a look at the construction site of the new Tesla Gigafactory near Berlin – @Getty
These are the moves reported by the two big wealth trackers.
Dec 15, 2025 +$168B
SpaceX tender offer at an $800B valuation
Jun 5, 2025 -$34B
Public feud with Trump, Tesla down 14% (Report.az, citing Bloomberg)
Mar 10, 2025 -$29B
Tesla down 15%, its worst day since 2020
Nov 6, 2024 +$26.5B
Tesla rally after the US election
Nov 9, 2021 -$35B
Second day of a $50B slide after his Twitter poll
Feb 22, 2021 -$15.2B
Tesla down 8.6% after his Bitcoin comments (Gulf News)
Sep 8, 2020 -$16.3B
The largest one-day plunge on record.
The November 2021 drop started with a poll asking his followers if he should sell 10% of his Tesla stake.
Bloomberg called the $50 billion two-day loss the biggest in its index’s history.
Elon Musk stands beside a rocket March 19, 2004 in El Segunds – @Getty
The June 2025 loss followed a war of words. Musk had called Trump’s tax bill a “disgusting abomination” and the exchange turned personal within days.
He also posted that he “will be around for 40+ years” while Trump had 3.5 left in office.
The SpaceX era: bigger base, bigger swings
The IPO turned billion-dollar days into hundred-billion-dollar days.
SpaceX began trading on June 12, 2026, closed its first day up about 19%, and made Musk the first trillionaire on paper.
Three days later the stock jumped another 20%. Forbes added $164.8 billion to his total on that Monday alone, for a record $1.3 trillion.
The peak came on June 16, at about $1.45 trillion.
The slide down was just as fast. SpaceX shares fell roughly 50% from that high by late July, and Wikipedia’s tally puts the drop at $750 billion, the largest net worth loss on record.
@Getty Images
Even inside the fall, single sessions swung hard. On June 29 a rally in both stocks added $62.3 billion and pushed him back above $1 trillion for a while.
On July 23 weak Tesla earnings sent the stock down 14.1% and cut $18.6 billion, leaving him at $731.7 billion.
By early October he had climbed back toward the line he first crossed in June. He is still number 1 by a wide gap, with Jeff Bezos second at about $370.7 billion on Forbes’ list.
How Musk talks about the money
He rarely celebrates the numbers in public.
When he first passed Jeff Bezos on January 7, 2021, his whole reaction on Twitter was “How strange” (Business Insider). A follow-up post read “Well, back to work …”.
The same week he pinned an older post about where the fortune is supposed to go. It opens with “About half my money is intended to help problems on Earth” and says the other half is for a self-sustaining city on Mars.
In a December 2020 interview with Axel Springer, he tied the Mars plan directly to his wealth. “That means just a lot of capital,” he said.
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I am Bulgarea Candin Stefan, and I founded FamousPeopleToday.com in 2018. I’m using my bachelor’s degree in economics and 9 years of experience in blogging to guide millions of people through the incredibly complex world of celebrity net worths.