By 
The SpaceX owner who also owns Starlink the new kid in the Zimbabwe internet space making rounds to its revolutionary entry to the Southern Africasn country’s market does face competition though.
The meteoric rise of Nvidia, the company whose computer chips are powering the artificial intelligence boom, could make Jensen Huang a trillionaire in 2028, according to Informa. Huang, Nvidia’s CEO and co-founder, is worth usd$104 billion, according to Bloomberg.
Indian billionaire Gautam Adani is also on track to become a trillionaire by 2028.
Whether Musk gets to the trillion-dollar mark first or at all for that matter will depend in large part on the future of his biggest success: Tesla.
The EV maker founded by Musk has become the world’s most valuable auto company, with a price tag of about $710billion. That makes it worth more than Coca-Cola, Bank of America and Boeing combined.
Tesla is easily Musk’s biggest asset. He owns nearly 13% of the company, a stake worth about $93 billion at current prices.
Musk owns another 303 million stock options linked to his epic and controversial compensation package, which was struck down by a judge but then revived and approved by shareholders.
If Tesla continues to thrive, it could push Musk’s fortune beyond $1 trillion.
“We believe Musk has positioned himself to achieve new heights over the coming years as Tesla capitalizes on full self-driving, Robotaxis and the future of EVs,” Dan Ives, senior equity analyst at Wedbush Securities, told CNN in an email.
Of course, that is no guarantee.
Tesla faces fierce competition, especially from cheaper rivals in China. The company has struggled at times, with softer sales crashing the stock by two-thirds in 2022. The automaker also issued multiple recalls for its vehicles, including a software recall of nearly all of its cars on US roads because of a glitchy Autopilot feature.
Musk had once revealed that Tesla was days from bankruptcy in 2008 before it secured a last-minute loan to keep it afloat.
The billionaire got in trouble in 2018, with regulators and shareholders for saying he had “funding secured” on a deal to take Tesla private for $420 a share. He was forced to make a payout of millions in fines and legal fees and step down as executive chairman.
“Musk has had his back against the wall many times with Tesla and despite the haters and skeptics he turned Tesla around,” Ives said. “He is the Teflon kid.”
His Tesla brand faces risks linked to the swirl of controversy that has followed him around for years as just this week, he deleted a tweet that questioned why former President Donald Trump has faced two apparent assassination attempts while President Joe Biden and Vice President have not encountered any.
“And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala 🤔,” Musk wrote in the post. He claimed the post was a joke and later deleted it.
Although Tesla is Musk’s biggest asset, it’s hardly his only one. He also owns stakes in tunnel construction company The Boring Company and artificial intelligence startup xAI.
And then there’s the historymaking SpaceX, the spacecraft maker which on Thursday pulled off the first non-government spacewalk ever.
As Bloomberg notes, Musk owns about 42% of SpaceX, a private company valued in June at a whopping $210 billion.
Musk also owns Neuralink, a brain chip implant startup that hopes to help people who are paralyzed regain movement.
A slice of Musk’s wealth also comes from perhaps his most controversial business: social media platform X. Musk acquired X (formerly known as Twitter) in 2022 after at first trying to get out of the $44 billion deal.
Musk’s ownership of X came under fire for its spread of misinformation, and stance on content moderation not to mention Musk’s own antisemitic tweets, causing X to lose value including his apology last year for what he called his “dumbest” ever social media post telling advertisers to literally go hang by tweeting “Go f**k yourself.”
Comments