Elon Musk is a billionaire like everyone else again as fortune drops below $900 billion

Elon Musk has lost more than half a trillion dollars in under a month.

The South African-born billionaire's net worth fell below $900 billion on Monday, landing at $879.3 billion after another slide in SpaceX shares stripped $37.9 billion from his fortune in a single session. On June 16 he was worth $1.45 trillion. He is no longer a trillionaire.

SpaceX did the damage. The stock dropped 3.8% on Monday afternoon to just under $140, closing in on the $135 price at which it went public a month ago. It has now fallen more than 38% from the all-time high above $225 it touched the day after listing, and has declined in 11 of its 17 trading sessions. Tesla fell 3% on the same day.

The scale of Musk's exposure explains the arithmetic. He holds 4.8 billion SpaceX shares and another 350 million options, alongside roughly 700 million Tesla shares. Every dollar the stock moves swings his fortune by billions.

He remains the richest person on the planet by a distance that borders on absurd. Larry Page ranks second at $290.1 billion, Sergey Brin third at $267.6 billion. Musk is worth more than both combined, twice over, even after the rout.

Wall Street is not selling. Raymond James has an $800 price target on SpaceX, a number that implies a market value well above $10 trillion. Analyst Brian Gesuale argued the company is building the foundational platform for the next generation of industrial capacity. Arete Research sits at $401, Morgan Stanley at $300, Goldman Sachs at $205. The average broker target is $236, roughly 70% above where the stock trades. Dan Ives at Wedbush called SpaceX one of the most differentiated assets in the technology market and said it is positioned to become a major hyperscaler across connectivity, launch and artificial-intelligence infrastructure.

The gap between those targets and the tape is the story. SpaceX listed on June 12 in the largest initial public offering in history, pricing 555.6 million shares at $135 and raising $85.7 billion after underwriters exercised their overallotment. It opened at $150, closed its first day at $160.95, and briefly carried a valuation above $2 trillion. Index funds were forced in when the Nasdaq-100 admitted it just 15 days after the debut, one of the fastest inclusions on record.

Then the sellers arrived. Musk lost $50 billion in a single selloff on July 7. Trading volumes have thinned as the novelty of the listing wore off, and the stock has spent this month drifting toward the price institutional buyers paid at the offering.

What underpins the valuation is Starlink. The satellite internet business generates the bulk of SpaceX's revenue, which reached $18.67 billion last year, and it serves 164 countries. Whether the company can grow into a multi-trillion-dollar valuation depends almost entirely on how many more subscribers those satellites can reach, and how cheaply Starship can put them in orbit.

That question gets tested on Thursday. SpaceX plans to launch the thirteenth Starship test flight from Starbase in Texas carrying 20 next-generation Starlink satellites, the first time the vehicle has flown with a paying payload. The satellites will attempt to connect with ground stations in South Africa using laser links, in the country where Musk was born and where Starlink still cannot legally sell service because it will not meet a 30% Black-ownership requirement.

Musk retains more than 80% of SpaceX's voting power through a dual-class structure, which means the selloff costs him money but not control. His fortune has swung by hundreds of billions before. Tesla shares have halved and recovered more than once over the past decade, and he has spent years telling investors to ignore quarterly moves.

The difference now is that SpaceX is a public company with a share price that prints every second, and Musk's wealth is tethered to it far more tightly than it ever was to Tesla alone. The world's richest man built a fortune that is, for the first time, mostly rocket.