Illustration by Fernando Capeto for Forbes; Photo by Breandan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
The world’s richest person added $62 billion to his fortune after private investors more than doubled the valuation of his AI and social media company to $250 billion.
Elon Musk is on the verge of becoming the first person ever worth $800 billion. Musk’s xAI Holdings raised $20 billion from private investors at a $250 billion valuation earlier this month, Forbes just confirmed. That’s up from the $113 billion valuation Musk claimed when he merged his artificial intelligence startup xAI with his social media company X (formerly Twitter) last March. Forbes estimates that the deal boosted the value of Musk’s 49% stake in xAI Holdings by $62 billion to $122 billion. The world’s richest person by far, Musk is now worth a record $780 billion, according to Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires List.
Other billionaire investors in xAI who got a big boost include Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Alsaud, one of Twitter’s earliest investors, Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey and Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, who contributed $1 billion to Musk’s $44 billion takeover of Twitter in 2022. Forbes estimates that Prince Alwaleed owns a 1.6% stake in xAI Holdings worth $4 billion (excluding a larger stake held by his publicly traded Kingdom Holding Company), boosting his net worth to $19.4 billion. Dorsey and Ellison, meanwhile, each now own an estimated 0.8% stake worth $2.1 billion, increasing their fortunes to $6 billion and $241 billion, respectively.
xAI’s latest funding round comes as the company has been spending aggressively amid the artificial intelligence arms race, burning $7.8 billion of cash during the first nine months of 2024, according to internal documents reviewed by Bloomberg. xAI’s Grok chatbot has been criticized in recent weeks for generating fake images of real women in bikinis and lingerie, including in a lawsuit filed Thursday by Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of Musk’s children.
Musk has already achieved a number of net worth milestones over the past year. In October, he became the first person ever worth $500 billion, after Tesla’s stock price nearly doubled over the five months following Musk’s announcement that he would be stepping back from his role as head of President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to spend more time on the electric vehicle maker. Then on December 15, Musk became the first person ever worth $600 billion, after private investors valued his rocket maker SpaceX at $800 billion, up from $400 billion in August. Four days later, Musk became the first person ever worth $700 billion, after the Delaware Supreme Court overturned a lower court ruling that had voided an award of Tesla stock options now worth $126 billion to Musk.
Despite that ruling, Tesla is still Musk’s second most valuable asset, after his 42% stake in SpaceX, which is worth $336 billion. In addition to Musk’s Tesla stock options, he also owns 12% of the EV maker’s common stock, bringing the total value of his Tesla holdings to $307 billion. Not included in that figure: the record-breaking pay package Tesla awarded Musk in November, which could give him up to $1 trillion in additional stock (before taxes and the cost of unlocking the restricted shares) if Tesla achieves “Mars shot” performance milestones like growing its market cap more than eightfold over the next ten years.
Musk is now a record $510 billion richer than the world’s second wealthiest person, Google cofounder Larry Page, who is worth an estimated $270 billion. Only one other person, Larry Ellison, has ever been worth $400 billion, and that didn’t last long. Since achieving that milestone in September, and coming within $40 billion of Musk, Ellison’s fortune has fallen by $159 billion, dropping him from No. 2 to No. 5 on Forbes’ Real Time Billionaires List. Musk’s stake in xAI Holdings alone is more valuable than the entire estimated $109 billion fortune of the world’s 16th richest person, Michael Bloomberg.
Additional reporting by Sergei Klebnikov, Iain Martin and Giacomo Tognini.
