Elon Musk, CEO of companies including Tesla, SpaceX and X and the planet's richest human, has hit a new wealth milestone.
On Wednesday afternoon, he became the first person worth $500 billion, according to Forbes, which keeps running tabs on the ultra-wealthy via its Real-Time Billionaires tracker.
Musk became a half-trillionaire in the mid-afternoon, Forbes explained, thanks to his massive Tesla holdings. Shares of the electric automaker opened at $443.80 Wednesday and rose to a high of $462.29 during the course of trading, pushing Musk's net worth north of the $500 billion mark.
The company's shares then dropped slightly, to close at $459.46. So too did Musk's fortunes suffer, ever so slightly: as of Wednesday evening, he was worth a mere $499.1 billion.
Still, Musk ended the day up $8.3 billion, according to the Forbes real-time tracker, and as the richest person in the world, as well as the first member of the $500 billion club.
Just last month, he briefly relinquished the title of world's richest person to Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison after the latter company's stock surged. As of Oct. 1, Ellison had again been relegated to second-wealthiest person, with a real-time net worth of about $350 billion.
Musk is also the wealthiest person in Texas, of course. His companies SpaceX, Tesla, The Boring Company and X are headquartered here, and his business portfolio in the state includes more than 500 properties sprawling across some 6,000 acres, according to a September 2025 Houston Chronicle analysis.
