Elon Musk has officially become the world’s first trillionaire. His estimated assets have reached and exceeded one trillion dollarsa figure which in English is indicated by the term “trillion”.
Achieving this goal depended on debut on the stock exchange (IPO) of space society SpaceXwhich he founded, and its share price. With the value of each share listed at $150, Musk’s stake in the company has exceeded 720 billion. This figure is in addition to his shares in the automaker Teslaestimated approximately 280 billion of dollars, and to those in the neurotechnology company Neuralink and in the infrastructure company The Boring Companywhich are worth a total of around 10 billion. In this way, Elon Musk’s estimated net worth has reached almost 1,100 billion of dollars.
Be careful, though: this doesn’t mean that Elon Musk actually has 1.1 trillion in his bank account or stored in a safe. As we said, most of its wealth is made up of shares of his companies. According to what Musk himself declared about X in February 2026, his liquidity would represent less than 0.1% of total assets. In other words, the amount of immediately available money “only” amounts to $1 billion.
When we hear figures so huge and far from our daily experience, we often struggle to understand what they really mean. So let’s try to understand better how much a “trillion” really is and how much they are worth a trillion dollars.
One million, one billion and one trillion: the differences
As we said, a “trillion” corresponds to billionthat is, a “1” followed by 12 zeros (1,000,000,000,000). This term is often erroneously reported in Italian as “trillion“, however, making an error of 6 zeros. The reason is that English-speaking countries, i.e. those that speak English as their first language, and continental Europe use measurement systems and naming large numbers different. A bit like what happens with “meters” and “feet” or “kg” and “pounds”, numbers above one million also follow different conventions. Continental Europe uses what is called the “long scale,” while English-speaking countries use the “short scale.”
In both scales the million (or “million”) is equal to a “1” followed by 6 zerosbut from then on the two scales diverge, using very similar terms to indicate different quantities. For example, on the American scale the “billion” corresponds to a “1” followed by 9 zeros, i.e. a billion. On the European scale, however, the “billion” corresponds to a “1” followed by 12 zeros, i.e. one thousand billion.
The “trillion” to which we refer when we talk about Elon Musk’s assets corresponds to one thousand billion (a “1” with 12 zeros), while the “trillion” European means 1 million billion (a “1” with 18 zeros).
It is therefore possible that misunderstandings may arise due to inaccurate translations. Even once this difference is clarified, however, it is not easy to imagine how much a trillion dollars are really worth.
What a trillion dollars are worth in the real world
One trillion dollars is so much that even combining the assets of the other three richest people in the world, namely Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google and Jeff Bezos of Amazon, we would not be able to reach that figure. There second person richest in the world, Google co-founder Larry Page, has a net worth of approximately 300 billion dollars, less than a third of Musk’s. His personal wealth is higher than the GDP of entire countries such as Switzerland, Saudi Arabia or the Netherlands: in a purely hypothetical scenario (as mentioned, he doesn’t have all this money in his pockets!) if he spent 1 million dollars in cash every day, he would still need 2,740 years to exhaust his assets.
But what does it really mean to be so rich? Let’s try to do a thought experiment and try to understand what we could buy with a trillion dollars.
Let’s imagine we want to offer a $50 dinner (around 43 euros) to all the inhabitants of the city of Romeapproximately 2.7 million people. Each dinner we would spend around 135 million dollars… a huge amount! For how many consecutive days could we continue to offer dinner to all Romans? Maybe we imagined being able to pay for dinner for everyone for a couple of weeks and already felt incredibly rich… well, with 1000 billion dollars we could continue to offer dinner to the whole of Rome for around 7400 days, which corresponds more or less to 20 years.
Again with this figure, one thousand billion, we could have bought all the tickets for all the dates of theEras Tour by Taylor Swift, the highest-grossing tour in history, well 500 times. Or we could have bought all 20 teams of Serie Avalued overall at around 5.4 billion dollars, 200 times. Musk could buy all the NBA franchises and still have hundreds of billions left over.
Beyond the most curious purchases, however, with one trillion we could solve problems on a global scale. We would, in fact, be able to provide clean, drinkable water in low- and middle-income countries or to eradicate the hunger in the world.
According to a UNESCO estimate published in 2021, ensuring universal access to drinking water and sanitation would require approximately 114 billion of dollars per year. To structurally address the problem of world hunger by solving it by 2030, investing in infrastructure, agricultural development and climate resilience, the United Nations, however, has estimated the need for approximately 93 billion of dollars per year.
This means that a trillion dollars would theoretically be enough to fund global interventions on some of humanity’s most pressing challenges for years.
