1. 1971 Born in Pretoria, South Africa. bullied kid coding video games at 12. main character origin story, fr 💀.
2. Moves to Canada, then the US with basically pocket lint. no trust fund saving him at this stage, just delulu confidence and a CS brain
3. 1995 drops out of Stanford after 2 days to build
Zip 2: sold it in 1999 → his cut: ~$22M at 27. First bag secured. 💰
4. Rolls it ALL into
X.com → becomes PayPal → eBay buys it in 2002. Elon's payout: ~$180M.
Most people would retire. this man said, "Anyway, Rockets." 🚀
5. 2002 starts SpaceX. 2004 funds Tesla.
He proceeded to almost go broke in 2008; both companies nearly died; he was reportedly borrowing money for rent. Net worth basically involves vibes and debt at this point. 📉
6. Survived 2008. Tesla SpaceX start cooking.
By the mid-2010s, he's a regular billionaire (low-key boring tier for him now)
7. 2020 Tesla goes parabolic. joins the $100B club. Centibillionaire unlocked. 🔓
8. 2021 officially the world's richest human, ~$300 B.
The ratio of him vs everyone else is insane
9. 2022 buys Twitter for $44B, renames it X. Chaos era.
Somehow not the wildest thing on this list
10. 2025 first person EVER to hit $500B, then $600B months later.
Casually breaking ceilings nobody knew existed
11. Late 2025 SpaceX's tender values it at ~$800B; his worth rips to ~$677B. trillionaire talk going crazy on prediction markets 📈
12 Feb 2026, sitting at ~$849B. Kalshi traders are giving him ~78% odds to hit $1T. it's giving inevitable
13. JUNE 12, 2026: SpaceX IPOs at $135/share, ~$1.77T valuation, raises ~$75B (biggest IPO in HISTORY). his ~38-42% stake gets repriced
14. 🚨 Net worth crosses $1.1 TRILLION. world's FIRST trillionaire. for context that's ~4x the #2 richest person and more than Page Brin Bezos COMBINED. 💀
15. The kicker: Tesla salary = $0. Man's worth a trillion with less than 0.1% in actual cash. It's all stock, peak.
"I don't have money; I have equity" energy
Moral of the story:
Dropped out, went broke twice, bet everything on rockets and cars everyone said would fail → became the world's first trillionaire.
"Built different" is an understatement. 🐐