• Elon Musk is too rich for the rich list.
• The Tesla and SpaceX CEO, worth $1.1 trillion, is wealthier than the next four richest people combined.
• Musk lost more than Warren Buffett's entire net worth on Monday.

Elon Musk is now so wealthy that he's making a mockery of the rich list.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO was worth $1.08 trillion as of Monday's market close, per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The next-richest person in the world, Alphabet cofounder Larry Page, was less than a third as wealthy with a net worth of $299 billion.

In fact, Musk is richer than the next four people in the billionaire rankings: Page, his cofounder Sergey Brin, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, who were together worth $1.06 trillion as of Monday's close.

The sheer scale of Musk's fortune means shifts in others' fortunes now pale in comparison. For example, Page, Brin, and Bezos each lost more than $10 billion in Monday's tech rout.

Those losses look paltry compared to Musk's $152 billion wealth decline on the same day, fueled by a 16% plunge in SpaceX's stock just days after its blockbuster IPO.

Put differently, Musk lost in one day a sum that exceeds Warren Buffett's entire fortune. The 95-year-old investor and Berkshire Hathaway chairman ranked 10th on Bloomberg's list with a $146 billion net worth at Monday's close.

Given Musk has a $700 billion-plus lead over anyone else, he simply looks out of place on a mere billionaires list. He's started a trillionaire club with only one member.

The wealth gap between Musk and his rich-list peers has only grown truly stark in the past few months. In fact, Ellison briefly leapfrogged him in September to become the world's richest person despite being worth less than $400 billion.

The key reason for Musk's net worth skyrocketing has been SpaceX's soaring valuation, which has boosted his fortune by $456 billion in less than six months, per Bloomberg's list.

That wealth gain has catapulted Musk into a league of his own and given him a seemingly insurmountable lead over the rest of the billionaire pack.

The yawning divide reflects Musk's large stakes in two companies valued at over $1 trillion: Tesla and SpaceX. It's hard to see anyone catching up to him, barring a massive crash in either company's stock price, given nobody else has two horses of that size in the wealth race.

• Tesla discontinued the Model S and Model X this year to focus on autonomy and robotics.
• Lars Moravy, Tesla's vice president of vehicle engineering, said, "Never say never" about a comeback.
• There's also a fresh teaser for the long-awaited Roadster.

BTS. The Pussycat Dolls. "Scrubs." It's en vogue these days to make a comeback.

Could Tesla's recently discontinued electric cars — the Model S and Model X — eventually join the trend?

Lars Moravy, Tesla's vice president of vehicle engineering, left the door open for the luxury sedan and SUV model revivals in an interview with the "Ride the Lightning" podcast released this weekend.

"It was just like: now is not the right time to keep this one going," he said about the decision to ax the cars. "That doesn't mean it goes away forever. Never say never."

To be clear, Moravy did not say Tesla is actively working on a new Model S or Model X — but he also did not rule it out.

He also offered a fresh reason for the car's discontinuation: global crash-test requirements.

"Every five years or so, Euro NCAP updates their protocols," Moravy said, adding that Tesla wants to make "the safest cars on the road," which requires structural updates.

The platform "was never designed for" some newer crash cases, he said, including small-overlap and offset tests. Tesla had made "band-aids along the way," but he said keeping the vehicles compliant would require "a massive overhaul."

Tesla has previously said the cars were discontinued because of new business goals. During a January earnings call, CEO Elon Musk said the automaker was giving the vehicles an "honorable discharge" as it shifted its focus toward autonomous vehicles and robotics.

The final Model S and Model X units rolled off the Fremont, California, production line in mid-May as the plant began transforming into an assembly line for Tesla's Optimus robot.

On the podcast, Moravy said Tesla sold about 750,000 Model S and Model X cars during their lifetime. When asked directly if the Model S and Model X could make a comeback, he said the vehicles "have done a great job for us in what they needed to do."

The podcast also included an update on Tesla's long-awaited second-generation Roadster. Franz von Holzhausen, Tesla's chief designer, said the company plans to build the two-door sports car in Texas.

"We've made, you know, first plans on that, and I think you'll see a lot of things start to unfold in the next months," von Holzhausen said.

Tesla didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• The newly public SpaceX S-1 reveals how closely Elon Musk's companies are connected.
• Last year, SpaceX was involved in more than $660 million worth of payments, goods, and services with the ventures.
• Here's a look at how SpaceX is intertwined with Tesla, The Boring Company, and more.

Step right up to Elon Musk's financial merry-go-round.

Tucked more than 200 pages into SpaceX's S-1 paperwork, which the company filed on Wednesday, is an outline of how interconnected Musk's various companies are, including through more than $660 million in payments, goods, and services involving SpaceX and his other ventures last year.

Musk has his hands in many pots. In addition to being the CEO of aerospace company SpaceX, he's the CEO (and "Technoking") of electric carmaker Tesla, the founder of tunneling business The Boring Company, the cofounder of brain chip firm Neuralink, and was the CEO of xAI, until it merged with SpaceX in February. In various ways, the companies are all intermingled.

SpaceX said in the filing that there may be "conflicts of interest," but ultimately, they benefit investors.

It's not uncommon for companies with certain ties to do business with one another and to spell out these relationships in a prospectus filing when they plan to go public. The breakdown in SpaceX's S-1 is the first look we're getting at some of its connections, including SpaceX's deals with The Boring Company or its purchase of Tesla Cybertrucks.

The biggest expenses between the companies fell under the banner of "commercial, licensing, and support."

Last year, SpaceX paid Tesla $144 million under such agreements, a figure significantly higher than in years past. xAI, then a separate entity, spent more, paying Tesla $506 million last year. xAI, then a separate entity, spent more, paying Tesla $506 million last year, while also bringing in $2 millon in revenue from Tesla.

The majority of SpaceX's cumulative $650 million in spending with Tesla was for Megapack products, Tesla's battery storage system. SpaceX also bought $131 million worth of Cybertrucks, which, at a starting retail price of $69,990 a pop, would be as many as 1,871 vehicles.

Additionally, Tesla paid $4 million last year to advertise on X.

Some expenses were driven by pure practicality: Tesla paid SpaceX $2 million to use its aircraft, X leased office space from The Boring Company for $1 million, and xAI rented space from the billionaire's umbrella company, Musk Industries LLC, for $2 million last year. SpaceX also spent $4 million on a security company owned by Musk for his personal security, as Tesla has done, per its filings.

Other expenses were mind-scratchers. SpaceX paid The Boring Company $1 million in connection with the construction of tunnels in Bastrop, Texas. These could be the tunnels connecting his facilities reported by local outlets, or they could be related to the chip facility SpaceX is building there.

Tesla and SpaceX's relationship is more than transactional

Musk's companies plan to continue doing business together, particularly Tesla and SpaceX, which, the company said, have a "strong and constructive partnership."

Tesla owns nearly 19 million shares of SpaceX stock. While that represents less than 1% of the company, at a target valuation of $1.5 trillion, those shares would be worth about $4.1 billion.

SpaceX and Tesla also have major projects in the works. The pair is developing Macrohard, an agentic AI platform, and, along with Intel, has partnered on Terafab, a manufacturing initiative that creates chips for Tesla's robots and vehicles, as well as SpaceX's orbital compute infrastructure.

The projects are set to be the beginning of a long relationship.

"We plan to explore other areas of strategic collaboration with Tesla in the future," the document says.

• SpaceX's IPO filing shows Elon Musk's companies are doing plenty of business with each other.
• An analyst told Business Insider the spending makes sense if SpaceX needed the products.
• It also shows how much SpaceX spent on Cybertrucks — and how that boosted the truck's sales.

Elon Musk's companies love to work together. Now, we have a bit more insight into how much money is moving between them.

On Wednesday, SpaceX filed its 277-page S-1, a document that peels back the curtain on the combined space-and-AI company's spending.

The filing showed that SpaceX (and its recently acquired fellow Musk company, xAI) bought hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of products from Tesla. Purchases included $697 million in Tesla Megapack products across 2024 and 2025, plus $131 million in Cybertrucks in 2025. The rocket company also bought an additional $34 million in Megapacks between January and March of this year.

The purchases were listed as "related party transactions."

The filing also described other ties between the companies — including work on voice-assistance features in Tesla vehicles, plans for a combined-use chip factory, and Tesla ad purchases on X.

"SpaceX and Tesla developed the early foundation of a strong and constructive partnership through a series of limited but successful commercial engagements," SpaceX wrote in the filing.

Seth Goldstein, an equity strategist at Morningstar who covers Tesla, said the related-party spending is "a little unique" to Tesla and SpaceX, but that the purchases themselves do not strike him as unusual.

"A company like SpaceX purchasing a large amount of work trucks and batteries for energy storage is not unusual and would be necessary for its business," he told Business Insider. "If what SpaceX is buying from Tesla or vice versa is necessary for its operations, then it makes sense."

Goldstein did say one element may raise investor eyebrows: SpaceX reported buying the Cybertrucks "at manufacturer's suggested retail price." He said most companies receive a discount when buying products in bulk.

That wording also offers a rare window into how many Cybertrucks may have gone to one of Musk's own companies.

Tesla sold 20,237 Cybertrucks in 2025, according to Kelley Blue Book. SpaceX did not reveal which trims it purchased, but based on Tesla's posted MSRP for the Cybertruck, the $131 million purchase would imply roughly 1,183 to 1,813 vehicles.

That means SpaceX's Cybertruck purchase could have represented about 6% to 9% of Tesla's Cybertruck sales last year.

SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• Bought a Tesla before 2023? Bad news: your car won't be able to drive itself.
• Elon Musk said last week that vehicles with previous-gen tech can't support full autonomy.
• Longtime Tesla owners told Business Insider they felt let down by the company's announcement.

For years, Tesla sold its EVs with the promise of an autonomous future. Now, some owners face being left behind.

On Tesla's earnings call last Wednesday, Elon Musk said that Tesla vehicles shipped before 2023 — which are equipped with a previous-gen Hardware 3 computer — would not be able to achieve fully unsupervised Full Self-Driving (FSD).

"I wish it were otherwise, but Hardware 3 simply does not have the capability to achieve unsupervised FSD," said Musk.

The billionaire said that Tesla would offer Hardware 3 owners the choice of a "discounted trade-in" or a physical replacement of their car's computer and cameras at "micro factories" in major cities.

The announcement is a major blow for longtime Tesla owners, who paid thousands of dollars and have been waiting for years under the impression that their vehicles have the tech necessary to achieve fully autonomous driving.

As far back as 2016, Tesla stated in marketing materials that all its vehicles had the necessary hardware for "full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver."

In a 2019 tweet, Musk said that all Tesla vehicles produced since 2016 had the right hardware for FSD or were "trivially upgradeable."

"It feels like a bait and switch at this point," Andrew Apperley, who bought a used 2018 Model 3 with FSD for $53,000 in 2023, told Business Insider.

"They kind of shot themselves in the foot by saying that this is going to come, and then it never does," Apperley said, adding that he felt like Hardware 3 customers would find it hard to trust Tesla and Musk's promises in the future after waiting in vain for unsupervised FSD.

Tesla did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Autonomy angst

Rick Flashman, who paid $10,000 for FSD when he bought his Model 3 in 2022, told Business Insider that, despite receiving increasingly generous trade-in offers from Tesla, he was not interested in swapping out his EV for a vehicle with up-to-date hardware.

"My car's in great shape. It's got 73,000 miles, it's driving perfectly, so I have no reason to upgrade it," Flashman said.

The Florida resident said that FSD was one of the main reasons he bought a Tesla, adding that he uses it for "over 90%" of his driving.

Hardware 3 vehicles in the US run a more limited version of FSD, with Tesla planning to release a "lite" variant of FSD version 14 for older vehicles in June.

Despite his car's limited capabilities, Flashman said he was well satisfied with the tech and is happy to wait for the overhaul Musk promised on Wednesday.

"It might take another year, but I'm one of the ones who's just waiting it out," he said.

"I wish it were sooner, obviously. But I don't feel like I was ripped off," Flashman added.

Matt Simmons, a Tesla owner who bought his Model 3 Performance in 2019, told Business Insider he added FSD for an extra $6,000 because he was curious about the hype. Seven years later, he says he rarely uses the feature.

"It kind of sucks, if I'm being honest," said Simmons, who said he doesn't use FSD on highway trips because of issues with the software's speed control.

Simmons said that he was not surprised by Musk's comments, pointing to the Tesla CEO's track record of making ambitious predictions for self-driving cars have often failed to fully pan out.

"We realize we're being strung along at this point," Simmons said.

The Pittsburgh resident described his Tesla as "long paid for" and said he had no intention of trading it in for a more advanced model.

"That would mean I'd have to buy another Tesla," said Simmons, who said he was hoping that rival EV maker Rivian would offer a similar deal for disenfranchised FSD owners.

Backlash goes global

Some Hardware 3 owners are done waiting for the software they paid thousands of dollars for years ago.

Tesla is already facing several lawsuits in the US from owners who say they were misled by the company's FSD marketing, and the backlash is starting to go global.

Earlier this month, Tesla finally received the green light to launch FSD in the Netherlands, marking the tech's debut in Europe after a yearlong campaign to woo regulators.

However, the rollout in the Netherlands excluded Hardware 3 owners, prompting Mischa Sigtermans, an executive at Amsterdam-based Ryde Ventures, to start a website to gather European Tesla owners for potential legal action.

Nearly 4,000 verified Tesla owners have now signed up to Sigtermans' website.

The Model 3 owner, who paid 6,400 euros ($7,530) for FSD in 2019, told Business Insider that Musk's comments confirmed many owners' worst fears, and said that the proposed solution of a discounted trade-in would simply make owners "pay for the same broken promise twice."

"Musk said out loud what many of us have been saying for months, if not years," said Sigtermans. "The admission is there, the solution isn't."

• Elon Musk shared a video that shows Cybercabs rolling out of the factory.
• The Cybercab is Telsa's upcoming two-seat, fully autonomous vehicle with no steering wheel or pedals.
• It's a huge part of Tesla's multibillion-dollar bet that it can become an AI and autonomy brand.

Tesla says its dedicated robotaxi model is finally in production.

On Friday, Tesla and its CEO, Elon Musk, shared a video on X showing several Cybercab units rolling off the production line in Austin.

The footage was filmed from inside the vehicles as they moved through the factory campus — and suggests Tesla is moving the Cybercab closer to reality.

Tesla is making a multibillion-dollar bet that the company can pivot from traditional car sales to an AI-driven robotaxi and robotics business.

The two-door, two-seat Cybercab — which does not feature a steering wheel or pedals — is one of the major pillars of that bet.

Just over a month ago, the automaker said it had just built its first production Cybercab. Now, the videos suggest Tesla has built multiple units, with Musk also reposting footage of Cybercabs seemingly turning onto a public street.

Starting production is only one step in a much larger challenge.

Tesla has yet to deliver fully autonomous driving at scale. During Wednesday's earnings call, the company removed specific timelines for robotaxi launches in five new cities.

Meanwhile, competitors like Waymo already operate driverless ride-hailing services in several cities.

Still, the videos suggest progress for a vehicle Musk has said would ramp "agonizingly slow."

The company didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• Elon Musk said that Tesla and SpaceX would collaborate on a moonshot Terafab chip-building project.
• Tesla has posted its first Terafab roles in California and Texas, and is offering a wide salary range.
• SpaceX is also ramping up hiring at its silicon division as it looks to bring chip production in-house.

Tesla and SpaceX are ramping up semiconductor hiring as Elon Musk's ambitious plans for a Terafab take shape.

Tesla is hiring Terafab engineers in Palo Alto and Austin, according to job listings on the company's website, after Musk said the company would collaborate with SpaceX to build what could be the largest chip manufacturing plant in history.

In California, the EV giant is looking for module process engineers with expertise in lithography, the highly technical discipline that uses ultraviolet light to etch chip designs onto silicon wafers at a molecular scale. It is offering a base salary of $88,000 to $240,000, depending on experience and other factors.

Applicants need to have at least 10 years of experience in cutting-edge semiconductor development.

The job listing suggests they would also need to be comfortable with Tesla's famously intense work culture, with expectations including a willingness to be on-call to "support 24/7 manufacturing operations" and respond rapidly to "critical production issues."

At the Terafab announcement on Saturday, Musk said the facility would create lithography masks — the quartz or glass template that contains the chip design imprinted onto the wafer — in-house, allowing Tesla and SpaceX to quickly iterate and improve chip designs.

"To the best of my knowledge, this doesn't exist anywhere in the world," said Musk, who added that the companies were exploring "some very interesting new physics" to make the project work.

Tesla's Terafab division is also hiring process integration engineers to build advanced logic chips, with base salaries ranging from $88,000 to $338,280. Musk has said Terafab will combine logic and memory chip production under a single roof, something that is highly unusual in the chipmaking industry.

The wide salary range is in line with Tesla's approach to compensation. Business Insider previously reported that the company offers lower base salaries than its tech giant rivals, but includes substantial stock grants.

Tesla is also advertising open roles for silicon engineers in Austin, and is looking to recruit a technical program manager with a proven track record of running "$100 million-plus capex projects" to oversee the design and construction of the fabs. Neither job listing includes base salaries.

Tesla faces talent scramble over Terafab

Recruitment will be one of the biggest challenges facing Musk's ambitious goal of building one of the world's largest semiconductor manufacturers from scratch. The industry relies on specialized knowledge that is carefully cultivated within leading companies like TSMC. It's also facing a global shortage of skilled workers.

SpaceX is scaling up its semiconductor hiring as the rocket maker prepares to launch up to one million orbital data centers, powered by AI chips built by Terafab that are specially adapted for the icy wastes of space.

The company has around 60 open positions in its Silicon division, according to SpaceX's website, though it's unclear which of these roles — if any — are directly related to Terafab.

They include assembly and packaging engineers at its Starlink factory in Bastrop, Texas, where the company invested $280 million last year to expand its semiconductor R&D and packaging facilities, as well as engineers in Washington and California to develop "cutting-edge" specialist chips for deployment in space and on Earth.

"In true SpaceX fashion, Starlink is taking the next step in vertical integration by bringing integrated circuit packaging and assembly in-house for development and manufacturing," read the descriptions on the Bastrop job listings, which do not include salaries.

SpaceX and Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.

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• Elon Musk is about to unveil his most challenging project yet: a giant semiconductor factory.
• The billionaire has said Tesla needs to build a "Terafab" to churn out chips for its robotaxis and Optimus robot.
• One analyst said to never rule Musk out, but that building a Terafab could be harder than sending rockets to Mars.

Self-driving cars, cyborgs, and catching rockets in midair: Elon Musk can't resist the lure of the impossible.

The world's richest man has made a habit of taking on the world's most difficult engineering challenges at Tesla and SpaceX — and has often proved the doubters wrong. His latest target is a tall order even by his standards.

For several months, Musk has been talking about building a "Terafab," a mammoth factory that would churn out semiconductors critical for Tesla's ambitious rollout of robotaxis and humanoid robots.

On Saturday, he teased that an announcement was imminent. "Terafab Project launches in 7 days," Musk wrote in an X post, without providing further details.

In a January earnings call, the billionaire cited chip production as the major long-term headwind to the company's growth, suggesting that output from suppliers Samsung, TSMC, and Micron would be nowhere near enough to meet Tesla's targets as the EV giant scales its robotaxi and humanoid robot programs.

"This is definitely going to be sort of a controversial thing, but I think Tesla needs to build a Terafab," Musk told investors, adding that such a facility would also protect Tesla against geopolitical upheaval.

The Tesla CEO suggested that the company would pursue the hardest possible version of that vision, a "very big fab" that would produce and package logic and memory chips entirely in the US.

Speaking at Tesla's annual shareholder meeting last November, Musk estimated the Terafab would aim to initially produce 100,000 silicon wafers a month and could eventually grow to 1 million.

Ahead of the Terafab announcement, Tesla has begun laying the groundwork for Musk's grand plan. The tech giant is hiring a semiconductor infrastructure manager to oversee factory design and construction, per a recent job posting. The role is based in Austin, suggesting the Terafab could be built near Tesla's gigafactory on the outskirts of the city.

However, analysts told Business Insider that Tesla would face enormous challenges — and a huge bill — as it tries to master one of the most complex technologies on the planet.

"It's Musk, so I would never count it out. But I suspect this is actually harder than sending rockets to Mars," Stacy Rasgon, managing director and senior semiconductor analyst at Bernstein, told Business Insider.

Semi-impossible?

The global supply of semiconductors is almost entirely produced by a small handful of companies, many of them based in East Asia.

Manufacturing them is an expensive, complicated, and time-consuming process. Deep within hermetically sealed factories, chip designs are etched onto thin silicon wafers at the molecular level by specialist lithography machines, which are almost entirely made by one company in the Netherlands and can have a waitlist of over a year.

Rasgon said that procuring these in-demand ASML-built machines was a critical roadblock for any would-be chipmaker.

"If you're a brand new customer, you're probably waiting a couple of years before getting your hand on one of those," he said.

Rasgon added that chipmakers usually split up production of logic and memory chips and semiconductor packaging across different factories.

Musk's suggestion that Tesla could integrate them all into one facility would make scaling the Terafab even more complicated, Rasgon said, as each product has wildly different processes and economics.

Musk is not alone in fearing geopolitical disruption. The threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, which would plunge global chip supply into chaos, has prompted companies, including TSMC, to build new chip fabs in the US.

But the road to US-produced semiconductors has been far from smooth. TSMC's Arizona expansion has faced years of delays and a total price tag of around $165 billion across multiple facilities.

The industry runs on technical knowledge that is deeply embedded within leading companies. TSMC flew employees out from Taiwan to help the Arizona facility ramp production and brought US workers to its home country to train them.

The need for specialized knowledge will make recruitment critical for Tesla's Terafab hopes, Rasgon said, adding that the semiconductor industry is already facing a worker shortage.

"These guys don't grow on trees," he said.

A 'Herculean' challenge

Analysts warned that overcoming these challenges would add to the severe cash burn Tesla is set to face in the coming years.

The company said in January it would spend $20 billion on building out its robotaxi and Optimus production lines this year, a figure which does not include the Terafab project.

Ben Kallo, a senior research analyst at Baird, told Business Insider that investors would have questions about how Tesla plans to fund such an ambitious project — especially considering Musk has also said Tesla will build around 100 gigawatts of solar panel manufacturing.

"Where's the money coming from? I think that's going to be a question," said Kallo, who added that he wouldn't rule out Tesla raising outside capital for the first time since 2020 to fulfill Musk's ambitious targets.

Musk hasn't given a specific timeline for building the Terafab and producing chips, but he said in the January earnings call that he was building it to "remove a probable constraint in three or four years."

In a Tuesday note, Morgan Stanley analysts led by Andrew Percoco pointed to Micron's factory in Boise — which began construction in late 2022 but isn't expected to begin shipping chips until mid-2027 — as evidence of how long it can take to build semiconductor infrastructure in the US.

They estimated that building a factory capable of producing 100,000 wafers for cutting-edge logic chips a month could cost as much as $45 billion. A note from UBS analysts in January estimated that just getting to Musk's initial production target of 100,000 silicon wafers a month would cost $30 billion.

"Even understanding Elon Musk's history of doing difficult things, this seems like a Herculean task," the Morgan Stanley analysts wrote.