Elon Musk loses trillionaire status as SpaceX and Tesla stock plummets
Elon Musk has lost his trillionaire status after making history when SpaceX made its Nasdaq debut earlier this month
Elon Musk has lost his trillionaire status just two weeks after becoming the first person in history to achieve it as the share prices of SpaceX slumped.
Listen to this article
The tech entrepreneur's fortune was valued at $957bn (£727bn) on Tuesday, down from the $1.11tn valuation less than two weeks before, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
This came following market concerns around the long-term profitability of AI, which has rocked several US tech giants.
Less than two weeks ago, Mr Musk celebrated becoming the world’s first trillionaire, and possibly the wealthiest person ever, when SpaceX made its New York Stock Exchange debut earlier this month.
At the end of the first day of trading, the share price of SpaceX had risen from $150 to $161, making it the sixth-biggest US company with a market value of over $2.1trillion.
Read more: Construction work starts on £750m national supercomputer
Read more: Young Scots feel AI deepfakes ‘now just part of daily life’, survey reveals
Mr Musk’s net worth was subsequently boosted to an estimated $1.1 trillion, Forbes reported.
Just two weeks on from the company’s promising debut, SpaceX's share prices have slumped following a wider sell-off in tech stocks, cutting Musk’s fortune down by $350 billion (roughly £264 billion).
Mr Musk has roughly a 38% stake in SpaceX, with 4.8 billion shares and 350 million stock options.
When the Nasdaq opened on Tuesday, SpaceX’s share price was at $151.90, down more than 16%.
Over $600 billion was wiped off the company’s market value over the last three sessions.
Following a sharp sell-off in the previous session, fuelled by doubts about debt-funded AI spending, tech giants like Nvidia, Tesla and Oracle were rocked.
Last year, Mr Musk also purchased xAI, which is behind the controversial Grok chatbot.
The deal will see Musk’s spaceflight and technology business take over Anysphere, the San Francisco-based company behind the coding platform.
It comes with a hefty price tag, which is based on Cursor’s stock valuation.
SpaceX said in April that it had begun working with Cursor to jointly train an AI model, and that it had been given the right to acquire the firm.
Cursor works by using AI technology to automate parts of the process of writing code and supporting software development.
It was previously reported that the success of SpaceX would add to the fierce rivalry between Mr Musk and Mr Bezos, who is developing his own space exploration technology, including Blue Origin, which he founded in 2000.
The company said in its IPO prospectus that the biggest potential market was the sale of business-oriented AI products, an ambition which is set to be helped by the Cursor acquisition.