Elon Musk has just misplaced about USD260 billion. Before anyone starts a crowdfunding campaign, though, he’s still worth an estimated USD745 billion—comfortably enough to remain the world’s richest person.
According to the latest Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Musk has slipped off the trillionaire perch after the market took a dimmer view of his two biggest wealth machines, Tesla and SpaceX. It sounds painful, but his fortune still outweighs the Philippines’ projected USD512 billion economy in 2025. Perspective matters.
Just three weeks earlier, on July 1, the estimated total network of Musk was at USD1.05 trillion—nearly double the nominal value of the Philippine economy in 2025.
The real story isn’t that Musk got poorer. It is that investors are suddenly asking a question they had happily ignored during the AI frenzy: When does all this spending actually start paying off?
Tesla gave them another reason to ask. The electric vehicle maker posted second-quarter revenue of USD28.2 billion, but profits missed expectations as the company kept shoveling money into artificial intelligence, robotics and self-driving technology. The reward? A nearly 15 percent plunge in its share price.
SpaceX wasn’t spared either, giving back much of its gain on Thursday in after-hours trade. Since so much of Musk’s fortune is tied to the market value of both companies, every rough trading day sends his net worth on a roller-coaster ride.
On Wall Street, billions can vanish faster than a Wi-Fi signal on a flight.
Musk isn’t alone. Alphabet, the listed parent company of search engine Google, also stumbled after investors looked beyond booming cloud revenue and zeroed in on a USD5.9 billion quarterly cash burn driven by AI investments—an amount that could increase moving forward.
Suddenly, “spend now, profit later” has lost its appeal. Investors are waking up to the reality that much of the AI boom is being funded with borrowed money and fresh equity issuances.
With Microsoft and Amazon reporting next week, investors are waiting to see whether Big Tech can finally prove AI is more than an expensive habit.
Even after his latest paper loss, Musk still sits comfortably ahead of everyone else, including Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin—ranked 2 and 3, respectively, in the Bloomberg list–whose combined estimated fortunes still trail his by well over USD170 billion.
The shifting fortune is a reminder that while Wall Street may be growing impatient with AI’s hefty price tag, the world’s richest man still has an extraordinarily long financial runway—even if it has become a little bumpier.
