What a bizarre time to be Elon Musk.
This yr opened with the businessman turned political operator throwing what appeared, to Nazis at least, to be a Sieg heil.
This spring, activists continuously congregated outside the showrooms of his automaker, Tesla, to protest his foray into the US federal authorities and comfy relationship with President Trump. They argued that his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, a cost-slashing operation named after a greater than decade-old web meme, didn’t slash a lot past overseas help. They cheered as Tesla missed Wall Road’s monetary expectations.
In Could, Musk blew up his relationship with essentially the most highly effective man on Earth with a couple of vicious posts on X; essentially the most highly effective man on Earth referred to as him a “TRAIN WRECK.” Tesla kept leaking money. DOGE fell sufferer to Washington infighting; it’s now reportedly decentralized and a shadow of the Musk private fiefdom it as soon as was.
And but: It appears Elon Musk is getting out of 2025 OK? Or, to place it succinctly: Elon Musk might not be the king of the world, however Elon Musk continues to be very, very highly effective.
Cash isn’t all the pieces, however with regards to the richest human within the identified universe, it’s price trying on the numbers. Tesla did a little bit of flailing this yr (extra on that in a sec), and traditionally, a lot of Musk’s wealth has been derived from the world’s Most worthy automaker. That needs to be unhealthy information for Musk. But it surely’s change into more and more clear that the Tesla CEO’s different, non-public corporations—SpaceX, xAI, Neuralink—have saved his portfolio diversified, shielding the aspiring trillionaire from a few of the whipsaws of the general public market.
Musk is price some $462 billion according to Bloomberg, and his stake in Tesla is valued at $140 billion, in accordance with financial filings—lower than half of his fortune. General, Musk’s wealth is up $29 billion since final yr.
So how did a man who started the yr because the president’s “First Buddy” and ended it as a political pariah pull it off? It was, principally, a story of two corporations: Tesla hitting some white water whereas SpaceX shot satellites into orbit and snapped up authorities contracts. Musk, in the meantime, cheered on from X, a web site that he seems to have massively overpaid for in 2022. However the funding labored; the platform set the tempo for political and social commentary amongst the worldwide proper wing for a lot of 2025.
By all accounts, Tesla had a less-than-stellar yr. The US electric vehicle market foundered as Trump’s authorities reduce tax subsidies and help for battery and automobile manufacturing crops. It levied, then pulled again, after which levied once more international tariffs which have strained your complete US auto trade. Musk’s firm wasn’t immune from the consequences.
