Elon Musk is wealthier than many economies of the world.
With Elon Musk's wealth back over $1 trillion, thanks to a surge in the value of SpaceX on Monday, the question is how to represent that staggering fortune.
Musk could buy about 11,000 F-35 fighter jets. He could afford every single National Football League, National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball and National Hockey League franchise, with plenty of change to spare. Musk could buy all of Moet & Chandon's Champagne production for the next 666 years or so.
But maybe the best comparison is with the size of national economies. Admittedly, that will trigger the people who don't like comparisons between stocks - the quantity (in this case wealth) at just one period of time - and flows, but it probably is the best way of understanding just how rich (very) Musk is.
To keep comparison simple, MarketWatch will use gross domestic production calculations, in U.S. dollars, from the International Monetary Fund, covering 2025. The IMF as of July expected 2026 world GDP to grow 3%, so the figures here won't be wildly different.
Musk, worth a cool $1 trillion according to Forbes, would slot in at number 23 - just behind Poland, at $1.04 trillion, and ahead of Taiwan, at $920 billion.
Switzerland, at $1.04 trillion, is also within Musk's cross-hairs, and it wouldn't take too much more to get into the $1.3 trillion level where he would be competitive with the economies of the Netherlands and Saudi Arabia.
On the flip side, Belgium at $725 billion and Ireland at $714 billion would be economies he could fall behind if the Musk industrial complex fell into a bear market.
It's almost hard to fathom how any other individual could surpass his wealth, barring some company-specific problem. Meta's (META) Mark Zuckerberg is number-two on Forbes list, worth $254 billion, and is exposed to many of the same artificial-intelligence - or should we say super-intelligence - trends as Musk.
Both SpaceX (SPCX) and Tesla (TSLA) rose in each premarket trading on Tuesday.
-Steve Goldstein