Elon Musk’s Wealth Soars To $400 Billion

Plus, an Asian-American cultural moment; Iranian drones over New Jersey?

A Tesla Cybertruck.

“Elon Musk has become the first person to reach $400 billion in net worth, the latest milestone for the world’s richest individual,” Bloomberg News reports.

Paul Krugman recently announced his retirement from the New York Times, but it’s a pretty good bet that paper and other left-leaning outlets will use the news as an opportunity to complain about “crony capitalism”—by which they mean Musk’s relations with President Trump—along with inequality. They’ll call for a wealth tax or a Biden-Wyden-style levy on “unrealized” capital gains.

Here we prefer instead to marvel at what Musk has going. He’s got Tesla, an electric car and solar energy company. He has SpaceX, which dominates commercial satellite launching, and which also operates Starlink, a satellite internet service provider. He has X, the social media platform that also has an artificial intelligence product. And he helped Trump win the 2024 election and is helping him staff the administration and reduce the size of government.

Any single one of those four things, on its own, would be more than a full time job. Yet somehow Musk is managing all of them. This is an immigrant success story about technological innovation, excellence at execution, bold bets, and willingness to embrace risk. It’s a reminder that the biggest long-term fortunes are often accumulated by not worrying too much about volatility. When I wrote about Musk back in April 2024, it was to note that his estimated wealth had declined to $195 billion from a $300 billion peak. Roughly nine months later, the fortune had roughly doubled. (You can quibble about mixing and matching the Forbes or Bloomberg numbers or the accuracy of either estimate, but the basic point holds.)

Levellers frequently claim that these fortunes result from inherited wealth or luck, or from the luck of inherited talent or wealth. Musk has had some luck, and Tesla has at times benefited from the government push toward electric vehicles and against fossil fuels. He’s also made some of his money in Communist China, which is not a free country. But the overall story isn’t a shame or a scandal or a coincidence. It’s about hard work and making products and services that provide value to customers and disrupt the status quo. It is a tribute to what is possible in America for someone with ambition and imagination.