Elon Musk’s net worth is $929.4 billion, according to the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires list as refreshed on 13 September 2026, which prices his holdings at Friday’s close. The common assumption is that Musk’s road back to $1 trillion runs through Tesla. It does not. He is $70.6 billion short, and on Forbes’ own share counts that gap closes if SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) rises $13.80, or 9.1%, to $165.01. Tesla on its own would have to climb 48.8% to $543.90, above the highest price the stock has ever traded. SpaceX closed at $151.21 and Tesla at $365.44 on 11 September. Every $1 on SpaceX now moves Musk’s fortune by $5.12 billion; every $1 on Tesla moves it by $0.40 billion. The richest person in the world is, in practical terms, a concentrated position in a stock that has been public for 13 weeks.
That arithmetic turns the trillion into a volatility question, and the market pricing it looks too calm. Polymarket’s “Elon Musk Net Worth on September 30?” contract puts only 15.9% on Musk being worth $1 trillion or more at month-end. We rebuilt Forbes’ figure from the holdings Forbes itself discloses, matched it to within $0.02 billion on three separate dates, and ran the two stocks forward over the 13 sessions left in September. Using the last 20 sessions of trading, the chance of a trillion comes out at 19.7%. Using the last 40, it is 29.3%. And the stock’s own record agrees with the higher number: of 49 thirteen-session windows since SPCX began trading, 15, or 30.6%, delivered the 9.1% gain Musk now needs. Polymarket is pricing three quiet weeks, not the stock it is actually betting on.
Key facts: Elon Musk’s net worth, September 2026
- $929.4 billion, ranked first in the world, with Larry Page second at $277.9 billion — Forbes Real-Time Billionaires, updated 13 September 2026 on the 11 September close
- 82.9% is SpaceX: 4,766,475,230 shares worth $720.7 billion plus 350 million options struck at $8.40 worth $50.0 billion — Forbes holdings data, 13 September 2026
- 15.6% is Tesla: 395,620,252 shares worth $144.6 billion; private stakes add $14.1 billion — Forbes holdings data, 13 September 2026
- $70.6 billion from $1 trillion, equal to SPCX at $165.01 (+9.1%) with Tesla unchanged — FinanceFeeds calculation
- Last above $1 trillion on 30 June; peak $1.204 trillion on 16 June; low $688.8 billion on 31 July, all on today’s holdings — FinanceFeeds calculation from stockanalysis.com closes
- The 9 September share unlock cost him about $30.4 billion in one session as SPCX fell 3.9% — FinanceFeeds calculation
- 15.9% Polymarket odds of $1 trillion or more on 30 September; 96.45% odds he is still the richest person on 31 December — Polymarket, 13 September 2026
Elon Musk’s Net Worth, Rebuilt Line by Line
Forbes does something most wealth trackers do not: it publishes the holdings behind the number. On 13 September its real-time feed listed exactly three market positions for Musk, plus a single line for everything private. Multiply them out and the headline figure falls out to the dollar.
| Holding | Units | Price | Value | Share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SpaceX Class A shares | 4,766,475,230 | $151.21 | $720.7bn | 77.5% |
| SpaceX options (strike $8.40) | 350,000,000 | $142.81 intrinsic | $50.0bn | 5.4% |
| Tesla shares | 395,620,252 | $365.44 | $144.6bn | 15.6% |
| Private holdings (Neuralink, The Boring Company, other) | — | — | $14.1bn | 1.5% |
| Total | $929.4bn | 100% |
Collapse that table and you get a formula anyone can run from a quote screen: Musk’s net worth ≈ 5.1165 × the SPCX price + 0.3956 × the TSLA price + $11.16 billion. The constant is the private stakes less the cost of exercising the options. We tested it against the three Forbes figures published over the past three weeks. At the 26 August close it gives $862.39 billion against Forbes’ $862.39 billion; at 4 September, $908.22 billion against $908.2 billion; at 11 September, $929.40 billion against $929.40 billion. Having reproduced the number that closely, we can treat Forbes’ methodology as a known function of two share prices, which is what makes the rest of this analysis possible.
Think of Musk’s fortune as a fund that strikes its net asset value every afternoon, with 83% of the book in one stock and 16% in another. The chart above is that fund’s daily NAV since SpaceX listed. It was already above $1 trillion at 15 June, the first close in our price record, topped out at $1.204 trillion on 16 June when SPCX closed at $201.80, and bottomed at $688.8 billion on 31 July. On today’s holdings it has spent six sessions above $1 trillion, the last of them on 30 June, which is also the last time SPCX closed above the $165.01 Musk now needs.
What the formula leaves out matters as much as what it contains. Musk’s Schedule 13G for SpaceX, filed 13 August, reports beneficial ownership of 6,418,547,515 Class A shares, or 48.4%, a count that includes Class B options exercisable within 60 days. His Tesla Schedule 13G/A, filed 17 June, reports 699,580,882 shares, or 19.9%, including 286,428,773 restricted shares “subject to a service-based vesting condition”. Forbes counts 395.6 million. The gap of 303,960,630 Tesla shares, the 2018 award Musk exercised in June, is worth $111.1 billion at Friday’s close. On the SEC’s basis his Tesla stake is $255.7 billion, not $144.6 billion.
Neither figure includes the 2025 CEO Performance Award of 423,743,904 Tesla shares, which the same filing says Musk “disclaims beneficial ownership” of until it is earned. At the current price that block would be worth about $154.9 billion gross. For the range of outcomes on the stock that dominates all of this, see our SPCX $215 bull versus $90 bear scenarios.
Musk has framed the listing that created this structure as a funding decision rather than a cash-out. Asked why SpaceX was going public, he said in an interview SpaceX filed with the SEC as a free writing prospectus on 8 June:
“We’ve been cash flow positive since around 2014 or 2015 and have been self-funding… What’s different now is that we’re embarking on a significant capital growth phase.”
— Elon Musk, Chief Executive Officer, SpaceX
Quick Take: Forbes’ $929.4 billion is 5.12 × SPCX + 0.40 × TSLA + $11.2 billion, reproducible to the cent. SpaceX is 82.9% of it. SEC filings put his Tesla stake $111 billion higher, and a further $155 billion Tesla award sits outside every tracker until it vests.
What Moved It: +$67.0 Billion in 12 Sessions
Between the 26 August close and the 11 September close, Musk’s net worth rose from $862.4 billion to $929.4 billion, a gain of $67.0 billion. SPCX rose 8.3% over the stretch and Tesla 5.7%. But the path was anything but smooth, and the two largest moves came from decisions taken by other people.
An analyst upgrade added $53.9 billion in a day. On 3 September, Oppenheimer’s Timothy Horan raised his SpaceX price target to $280 from $250 and kept a Buy rating, as reported by TradingKey and covered in our note on the SPCX surge after the Oppenheimer call. SPCX closed 6.4% higher. By our calculation, Musk’s fortune went from $872.3 billion to $926.2 billion between the 2 and 3 September closes.
A share unlock he took no part in cost $30.4 billion. On 9 September, SpaceX released another tranche of roughly 319 million post-IPO shares from lock-up, the third staged release since the listing. SPCX fell from $153.47 to $147.55, down 3.9%, and Musk’s net worth fell from $942.0 billion to $911.6 billion. He could not have sold into that move even if he had wanted to. The SpaceX prospectus is explicit: “Shares held by Mr. Musk will not be subject to any early release provisions.” The remaining release dates are set out in our SpaceX lock-up calendar through 8 December.
The holders on the other side of those unlocks are institutions with very different constraints. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund reported 154,146,835 SPCX shares in its 13F filed on 14 August, a position worth about $23.3 billion at Friday’s close, as detailed in our breakdown of the PIF’s $26.3 billion SpaceX stake. Every such holder can trade on days when Musk cannot, which is why his number absorbs every unlock and can monetise none of them.
Tesla, meanwhile, is supplying the narrative rather than the dollars. On 12 September Tesla teased a 1 October event for the next-generation Roadster, per Bloomberg, with a teaser image showing thrusters firing. Musk’s reply on the company’s X post, reported by Tesla Oracle, was: “It’s out of this world.” The SpaceX imagery feeds the long-running question of whether the two companies eventually combine. Neither company has announced any such plan. On Tesla’s second-quarter call on 22 July, Musk declined to rule it out, according to Reuters: “As you can tell from the many collaborations on so many fronts with SpaceX, there’s more and more overlap.”
For the wealth arithmetic, a merger would matter less than it sounds. Tesla moves Musk’s fortune by $0.40 billion per dollar against SpaceX’s $5.12 billion, so Tesla’s 5.7% gain over the fortnight was worth about $7.8 billion, less than a single average SpaceX session. For the Tesla-specific scenarios, see our TSLA $500 bull versus $250 bear page.
Quick Take: One analyst note added $53.9 billion and one unlock subtracted $30.4 billion. Neither involved anything Musk did. Tesla’s news flow is louder, but its dollar impact on his fortune is roughly one-thirteenth of SpaceX’s per dollar of share price.
The Trillionaire Odds: Polymarket Against the Tape
Polymarket runs a seven-bracket contract on Musk’s net worth on 30 September. It resolves on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index datapoint for that date, not on Forbes. We set its prices on 13 September beside two versions of our model: one using SPCX and Tesla volatility and correlation over the last 20 sessions (42.7% and 50.5% annualised, correlation 0.46), and one using the last 40 (79.9% and 58.8%, correlation 0.23). Both run 400,000 simulated paths over the 13 sessions to 30 September on Forbes’ holdings.
| Net worth on 30 Sep | Polymarket | Model, 20-day volatility | Model, 40-day volatility |
|---|---|---|---|
| Below $700bn | 1.3% | 0.1% | 4.0% |
| $700bn-$800bn | 8.2% | 5.2% | 15.0% |
| $800bn-$900bn | 35.5% | 32.6% | 26.2% |
| $900bn-$1tn | 42.5% | 42.5% | 25.5% |
| $1tn-$1.1tn | 13.0% | 16.9% | 16.7% |
| $1.1tn or more | 2.9% | 2.8% | 12.6% |
| $1 trillion or more | 15.9% | 19.7% | 29.3% |
The pattern is clear once the columns sit side by side. Polymarket’s middle brackets match the calm, 20-day model almost exactly: 42.5% against 42.5% for $900 billion to $1 trillion, and 35.5% against 32.6% for the bracket below. Traders have, in effect, priced SpaceX as if the last month of trading is the whole story. The trouble is that SPCX’s annualised volatility since listing is 82.5%, nearly double the recent 42.7%, and the stock has had 13 sessions with moves of 5% or more, including a 13.6% fall on 5 August and a 15.8% rise on 7 August. Using the fuller volatility, the $1 trillion tail nearly doubles to 29.3% and the sub-$800 billion tail almost doubles as well.
The historical base rate settles which column deserves more weight. Across the 49 thirteen-session windows in SPCX’s short price history, the stock gained 9.13% or more in 15 of them, a 30.6% hit rate, much closer to the 40-day model than to Polymarket’s 15.9%. Two caveats belong next to that. First, this is a thin market: the whole seven-bracket event has traded $16,912, and no single bracket has more than about $850 of resting liquidity, so a handful of orders can move it. Second, it settles on Bloomberg, which we could not access; shifting our model up or down by $5 billion to allow for methodology differences moves the $1 trillion probability by only one to two points.
The longer-dated question is not close. Polymarket’s “Richest person on December 31, 2026?” contract, which has traded $1.93 million in total and $196,657 on the Musk leg alone, puts him at 96.45%. That is consistent with the arithmetic: Page, at $277.9 billion, would need Musk to lose roughly 70% of his fortune for their positions to swap. Our look at the trillionaire race among Musk’s rivals shows how far back the field sits.
Quick Take: Polymarket prices a 15.9% chance Musk is a trillionaire on 30 September. SPCX’s recent volatility implies about 20%, its fuller volatility about 29%, and its own history about 31%. The market is thin and is pricing the calm, not the stock.
Why No Two Trackers Agree, and the Rules Behind It
The same fortune is measured under three different rulebooks, and each produces a defensible but different number.
The SEC counts control. Beneficial ownership under the Schedule 13G regime counts shares a holder can vote or dispose of, including options exercisable within 60 days. That is why Musk’s SpaceX filing shows 6.42 billion shares and his Tesla filing shows 699.6 million, including restricted stock that has not vested. The rule is designed to tell other shareholders who controls a company, not what anyone is worth.
Forbes counts economic ownership. Its real-time list holds 4.77 billion SpaceX shares, 350 million options at intrinsic value and 395.6 million Tesla shares, and it leaves out the restricted Tesla block, the 2025 award and the unvested performance shares. Bloomberg runs its own index and updates at the close of each New York trading day; its site returned a CAPTCHA wall to every request we made, so we cite no Bloomberg figure here. That matters because Bloomberg, not Forbes, settles both Polymarket contracts cited above.
Contracts decide what he can sell. Here the answer is none of it. Under the prospectus, Musk agreed with the underwriters that for “a period of 366 days after the date of this prospectus, all of the shares owned by him are subject to” lock-up restrictions, which runs to June 2027. The prospectus adds that the shares locked for more than a year total 7.8 billion, “including 100% of the shares owned by Mr. Musk”, about 60% of the shares outstanding after the offering. So the largest fortune ever recorded is fully marked to market every afternoon and fully illiquid at the same time.
Tesla’s 2025 award adds a governance layer on top. Shareholders approved it at the 6 November 2025 annual meeting, per Tesla’s 8-K. Until the shares are earned, Musk’s 13G/A says they are “subject to a voting agreement” under which “an irrevocable proxy has been given to Tesla’s secretary to vote the shares proportionately to the votes of other shareholders”. The first tranche requires a Tesla market value of $2 trillion, against about $1.44 trillion today, which would take the stock to roughly $506. The tension is plain: the award was sold to shareholders as a way to keep Musk focused on Tesla, while 83% of his measured wealth now sits in a different company. Musk himself has said any combination would need formal handling. “It’s got to be done with the appropriate process,” he said on the July call, as reported by Reuters.
What Happens Next
1. The 24 September unlock is the swing event for the September contract. Tracker estimates compiled in our lock-up coverage put the next tranche at roughly 328.4 million shares, and it lands inside the window Polymarket is pricing. The 9 September tranche of about 319 million shares coincided with a 3.9% fall in SPCX. A move of that size on 24 September would take about $30 billion off Musk’s net worth and push him towards the $800 billion to $900 billion bracket. A rally that shrugs it off, as SPCX did after the 3 September upgrade, puts $1 trillion in reach. Our base case is that he finishes September between $900 billion and $1 trillion, with the trillion itself closer to a one-in-four chance than one-in-six.
2. The bigger overhang is the earnings-triggered release in November. The largest remaining tranche, about 1.3 billion shares, is scheduled to unlock two trading days after SpaceX reports third-quarter results, with a final tranche of about 797.6 million on 8 December. That is roughly four times the September supply. We expect that calendar, more than any Tesla headline, to decide whether Musk ends 2026 above or below $1 trillion, because each $1 of SpaceX price is worth $5.12 billion to him and Tesla cannot offset that at $0.40 billion.
3. Tesla’s upside will stay invisible to the trackers until it vests. The 1 October Roadster event and Tesla’s third-quarter deliveries will move TSLA, but on Forbes’ basis a 10% Tesla rally adds only about $14.5 billion. The 423.7 million-share 2025 award, worth about $155 billion at today’s price, will not appear in any headline figure until a tranche is earned, and the first requires a $2 trillion valuation that Tesla has never reached.
The single number to watch is $165.01. Until SpaceX closes above it, Elon Musk’s net worth stays below $1 trillion on Forbes’ own holdings. Once it does, he is a trillionaire again, with no need for Tesla to move at all.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Elon Musk’s net worth today?
Elon Musk’s net worth is $929.4 billion, per the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires list updated on 13 September 2026 using the 11 September market close. That comprises $720.7 billion of SpaceX shares, $50.0 billion of SpaceX options, $144.6 billion of Tesla shares and $14.1 billion of private holdings. He is ranked first in the world, ahead of Larry Page at $277.9 billion.
How far is Elon Musk from becoming a trillionaire again?
He is $70.6 billion short of $1 trillion. On Forbes’ holdings, that gap closes if SpaceX stock rises to $165.01, a 9.1% gain from its $151.21 close, with Tesla unchanged. Tesla alone would need to reach $543.90, up 48.8% and above its record high. Polymarket prices a 15.9% chance he is worth $1 trillion or more on 30 September.
Was Elon Musk ever a trillionaire?
Yes. Forbes says he became the world’s first trillionaire on 12 June 2026, when SpaceX began trading. Valuing his current holdings at each daily close, his net worth peaked at $1.204 trillion on 16 June and stayed above $1 trillion for six sessions, the last on 30 June. It then fell as low as $688.8 billion on 31 July before recovering.
How much of Elon Musk’s wealth comes from SpaceX?
About 82.9%. Forbes counts 4,766,475,230 SpaceX shares and 350 million options, together worth $770.7 billion of his $929.4 billion. Tesla accounts for 15.6% and private companies 1.5%. That concentration means every $1 move in SPCX shifts Musk’s net worth by $5.12 billion, compared with $0.40 billion for a $1 move in Tesla.
Why do Forbes, Bloomberg and SEC filings show different numbers?
They count different things. SEC filings report beneficial ownership, including restricted Tesla shares and options exercisable within 60 days: 699.6 million Tesla shares and 6.42 billion SpaceX shares. Forbes counts economic ownership, including 395.6 million Tesla shares. Bloomberg runs its own daily index. The Tesla difference alone is worth about $111 billion at current prices.
Can Elon Musk sell his SpaceX shares?
Not until June 2027. The SpaceX prospectus says all of Musk’s shares are locked up for 366 days after the June 2026 offering and that his shares “will not be subject to any early release provisions.” Other holders are being released in staged tranches through 8 December 2026, but Musk is excluded from all of them.
This article is for information only and is not investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Net worth figures are estimates published by third parties and change with every trading session; the Forbes figures cited are timestamped 13 September 2026 and reflect the 11 September 2026 closes. Calculations labelled as FinanceFeeds’ hold Forbes’ disclosed holdings constant and vary only share prices. Probability estimates are model outputs, not forecasts of certainty. Bloomberg’s index could not be accessed and no Bloomberg figure is cited.