Elon Musk has become the world’s first trillionaire following a record-breaking initial public offering linked to his rocket and artificial intelligence company, SpaceX.
On Friday (June 12), SpaceX ended the trading day with a valuation exceeding US$2 trillion, pushing Musk’s personal net worth to around US$1.2 trillion, according to figures reported in the wake of the listing, reports New York Times.
The milestone triggered global attention, signalling what many see as a new phase of intense investor enthusiasm for technology and artificial intelligence. It also prompted both celebration and criticism.
Executives at JPMorgan Chase, one of the financial institutions involved in the IPO, reportedly planned a dinner featuring tomahawk steaks, followed by a celebratory celestial light show on the rooftop of the bank’s Park Avenue headquarters in New York.
However, the news also drew sharp political reactions.
“Reason #1,000,000,000,000 why we should tax the rich,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City wrote on the social platform X.
US Senator Elizabeth Warren, a long-time critic of wealth inequality, also commented on social media, stating that an average American household would need more than 11 million years to match Musk’s level of wealth.
While today there are more than 3,300 billionaires worldwide including over 900 in the United States alone, the idea of extreme personal wealth is relatively modern.
Historical records show that the first billionaire emerged on 29 September, 1916, when John D Rockefeller, the Gilded Age oil magnate, reached the milestone.
He is widely regarded as America’s and almost certainly the world’s first billionaire, according to Christopher McKnight Nichols, a history professor at Ohio State University who has extensively studied the Gilded Age.
A billion dollars in 1916 would be worth more than US$30 billion today.
At the time, The New York Times reported on its front page that Rockefeller’s fortune had surged after a rise in Standard Oil stock pushed share prices above US$2,000.
Much like reactions to Musk today, Rockefeller’s new status triggered widespread public fascination and debate over extreme wealth.
“People really were thinking in the way that we do now as contemporaries about, ‘Oh, wow, now he’ll have twice as much as the next highest person on the list’,” Nichols said.
“People really were thinking in the way that we do now as contemporaries about, ‘Oh, wow, now he’ll have twice as much as the next highest person on the list’,” he added, noting that rankings of the richest individuals existed even then, similar to today’s Forbes lists.
He said many people at the time struggled to comprehend the scale of a billionaire’s fortune.
“I think a billionaire then is like a trillionaire now,” Nichols said. “You simply can’t fathom that many zeros.”
Nichols also noted that public sentiment in 1916 was often uneasy about such concentrated wealth, particularly during the Progressive Era, when there was strong political pressure for government intervention to curb excesses.
He added that Rockefeller’s billionaire status was partly shaped by the 1911 breakup of Standard Oil into multiple companies, which later grew significantly in value.
Looking further back, the first American millionaire was John Jacob Astor, a real estate magnate in New York City. His milestone likely occurred in the 1820s, although the exact timing remains uncertain, Nichols said.
By the time of his death in 1848, Astor had accumulated tens of millions of dollars.
At that stage, however, vast wealth was not subject to the same public scrutiny or widespread fascination seen in later eras. Nichols said most ordinary people would not have been aware of the full scale of Astor’s fortune.
Astor was not the last millionaire, and the United States has since produced hundreds of similar fortunes since Rockefeller’s time, at least in relative terms.
Looking ahead, Nichols suggested that Musk may not remain the only figure at the trillion-dollar level for long.
“I would suspect in the very near term we will see, through AI IPOs, another trillionaire,” he said.
