• 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.

• Josh Giegel joined SpaceX in 2009 and worked there for 3 years. He says the equity he received has been "liberating."
• Giegel's SpaceX equity has allowed him to put a down payment on a house and help pay off his wife's student loans.
• "The equity also allows me to take a lower salary at my startup," Gambit, he said, and that means he can hire more people.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Josh Giegel, the 41-year-old cofounder of the AI startup Gambit, who lives in Los Angeles. It's been edited for length and clarity.

I was in grad school at Stanford, finishing my master's and wanting to do a Ph.D.

I had worked at NASA the previous summer, and one of the women I worked with was also a Stanford graduate, and was like: "You're going to be so bored at NASA. Why don't you check out this small space company in Los Angeles called SpaceX?"

I applied and interviewed in the two weeks between flight three and flight four of Falcon 1. I interviewed with Elon; he was still interviewing pretty much everyone at the time. I remember going back to my advisor and saying, "There's nothing I'd rather do on the planet than what he just described."

My Master's ended at the end of 2008, and I began in 2009.

I was on what's called the propulsion analysis team, which was four or five people. Our responsibility was: How do you design the first reusable rocket engine? A very small group of us was responsible for the initial stuff that was on Falcon 9.

I started there when I was 23, and I left when I was 27. It was a little bit of naive immaturity. I knew I wanted to start a company one day, and SpaceX was growing like crazy. I wanted to be on a founding team. I still love the company; I almost went back two or three years later before I ended up starting a company of my own.

The IPO is pretty cool. I'm on a bunch of text threads with guys who were there around the same time, and a couple of them are still there. It's cool to see just how big it became.

When I got there, and they gave the offer, there was an equity component. I remember the HR woman who was going over it with me saying, "We think some day, in 10 or 15 years, this might be worth $250,000-300,000." I distinctly remember her saying, "It might get you a nice down payment on a house in Los Angeles."

We all laugh about it now. But, at the time, the saying was: the fastest way to become a millionaire in space is to start as a billionaire.

Buybacks have been really regular for the last 10 years. Every now and then, we'd take a little bit out. For example, we paid off my wife's student loans a number of years ago. We put down a down payment on a house.

I joke: We did actually get a down payment on a house! She wasn't lying when she said that. It's a house that, on our normal salaries at startups, we wouldn't have been able to afford without that additional windfall.

We also love traveling. We've got a seven-year-old and a one-year-old. We're going to go on slightly more adventurous trips because of it.

My wife is also thinking of doing a larger career change that would come with a decent salary reduction, which she probably wouldn't have been able to do without something like SpaceX.

Professionally, I've always been risky. If the majority of your net worth is tied up in a rocket company, you must be a risk-tolerant individual.

Gambit is a VC-backed company. We've raised about $15 million to date, and there are a couple more investment rounds that are coming. The IPO puts you in a position where folks with a substantial amount of equity could be interested in becoming investors.

At least ten of the people I worked with intimately have started their own company. There was a band that I played in with five SpaceX people; four of us started our own companies. I played guitar.

That whole ecosystem can fund its own endeavors and each other. The quantum of capital that they can put in is not like your typical family and friends round. That's typically $20,000, $50,000, maybe $100,000. Here, that could be on the order of $1 million, maybe $2 million per check.

You also become a bit of a mercenary, asking, "I don't need a paycheck from what I'm going to go do, so what am I going to go do?" It's liberating.

The equity also allows me to take a lower salary at my startup, so that I can go out and hire more people to make my company more successful.

• 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.

• Elon Musk has had a rocky relationship with advertisers since acquiring Twitter in 2022.
• Musk's X sued advertisers for allegedly violating antitrust law by boycotting the app.
• New SEC filings show that X's efforts to win back advertisers haven't led to a bonanza.

Elon Musk's attempts to win over advertisers have yet to spark a major recovery in ad revenue for X.

In 2025, ad revenue for X (formerly Twitter) reached $1.8 billion, up around 7% from 2024. That said, revenue was down 21% from 2023 and about 59% from 2021, the year before Musk took over Twitter and began alienating some brands with looser content moderation.

Here were the stats:

X's ad revenue figures were revealed in an S-1 filing by SpaceX, X's parent company.

Since buying Twitter, Musk's relationship with advertisers has been rocky.

In 2023, he told marketers who were skipping out on X ads that they could "go fuck yourself."

Musk hired an ad industry veteran, Linda Yaccarino, in 2023 to help woo marketers. Yaccarino previously ran ad sales at NBCUniversal.

The drama with the ad industry didn't stop, though.

A year later, X sued an advertising trade group, The World Federation of Advertisers, and some members, including CVS, Unilever, and Mars, alleging they violated antitrust law by collectively withholding ad spend. A judge later tossed out the suit, citing a lack of jurisdiction and X's failure to state a claim under the antitrust laws.

Yaccarino left the company in July 2025.

Last year, there was industry chatter that Musk's entry into politics may have helped X's ad prospects. As Musk took on a high-profile role in the US government, some advertisers began spending on X again. Ad industry insiders previously told Business Insider that they felt buying ads on the app had become a cost of doing business to appease Musk and his allies in President Donald Trump's White House. Musk left his role, and his relationship with the Trump administration has since become more muddled.

Advertising's centrality as a revenue source for X diminished in March 2025 after Musk decided to merge the app into his artificial intelligence company, xAI. The company's AI revenue is growing much faster than its advertising revenue, reaching around $1.35 billion in 2025, a 52% increase from the previous year.

With the decision to merge xAI into SpaceX earlier this year, advertising now accounts for just a fraction of the combined company's $18.7 billion in 2025 revenue.

That doesn't mean X has stopped trying to improve its ad products.

Last month, X announced it had revamped its ads business to integrate more AI tools. This month, X rolled out a new tool that uses AI to connect brands with creators that might be a good fit for their campaigns.