Elon Musk has lost his trillionaire status barely weeks after claiming it, as shares in SpaceX and the electric carmaker Tesla came under heavy pressure this week.
The entrepreneur’s total net worth slipped to $957bn on Wednesday, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the daily ranking of the world’s richest people. It is a striking reversal for a businessman who, only this month, became the first person in history to be valued at more than $1tn.
Musk crossed that threshold when SpaceX made its long-awaited stock market debut. The aerospace group raised a record-breaking $75bn at a valuation of $1.75tn, instantly placing it among the most valuable companies on the planet and turbo-charging its founder’s paper fortune.
The shares have been anything but settled since. After listing, the stock surged, briefly carrying SpaceX above a $2tn valuation and lifting Musk’s estimated wealth to $1.1tn. They have since fallen sharply from that peak, wiping hundreds of billions of dollars from the company’s market value.
The slide appears to have been amplified by SpaceX’s relatively small public float. With only a modest slice of the company freely traded, comparatively limited volumes have been enough to trigger outsized swings in the price, a dynamic familiar to anyone who has watched thinly traded listings whip about in their early sessions.
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