Elon Musk has become the first person to reach a net worth of $500bn, bringing the Tesla chief executive halfway to trillionaire status.

Musk’s wealth temporarily crossed the half-trillion mark on Wednesday before retreating to $499bn, according to the Forbes billionaires list.

Musk owns 12% of Tesla, which is worth more than $1.5tn, and his wealth has been boosted this year by surge in the electric carmaker’s share price.

  • Juice@midwest.social
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    14 hours ago

    Why are ppl still buying teslas. How does he make so much money if everybody fucking hates him? Whyyyyyy

      • lemmy_outta_here@lemmy.world
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        12 hours ago

        It has started to make me question my sanity. Every week there is a headline like “Tesla sales collapse in Europe and Asia” or “Huge class action suit filed against Tesla” and the result is always the same: TSLA stock goes up.

    • bfg9k@lemmy.world
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      13 hours ago

      The general public has forgotten about him already, he’s retreated from the news because the bad press was hurting sales

      I see brand new Tesla’s everywhere, the company will not be going away anytime soon

        • P1nkman@lemmy.world
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          13 hours ago

          New car sales in Norway in September 2025: 98% electric. 1/3 of them were Teslas. Sales are also up in Denmark.

      • Juice@midwest.social
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        13 hours ago

        I saw a Tesla truck this am with a license plate something like “S3XY B3AST” and it did not belong to Ben Kingsley.

    • JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz
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      16 hours ago

      But he continues paying random women to have his kids because they all start hating him after a while, and apparently 13 tries hasn’t been enough for him to notice the one thing in common with all of them.

      • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world
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        14 hours ago

        I don’t think he cares all that much if they like him as long as they disseminate his precious genes and tolerate the idiotic names.

  • Ethalis@jlai.lu
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    21 hours ago

    How is that asshole STILL getting richer? If there ever needed a proof that the system is broken, there it is

    • The Quuuuuill@slrpnk.net
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      21 hours ago

      the system is worse than broken, it’s working exactly as intended. the best solution? get out and meet your neighbors. talk to them about how they hate their bosses. tell them about things people are doing to undo this rigged game. don’t at any point claim yourself to be a leftist. just offer to help them out of their nightmarish material conditions

    • redsand@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      18 hours ago

      He’s not. This article is bullshit by a poor person. Elon, unlike someone like Bill Gates, still has most of his “worth” in TSLA. TSLA is held up purely by hype and the sunken cost fallacy. The hype is gone and now investor with brains are liquidating but Elon can’t, he’d crash the stock selling more than a couple billion. So we get to watch the market desperately try to keep TSLA( that people put pension money in) afloat as the market burns around them and Elon’s imaginary money dwindles. In reality he has something like 10B liquid and probably something similar in assets that aren’t a dead car company.

      • shalafi@lemmy.world
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        15 hours ago

        Thank you! Someone around here gets it. Look at these comments. People seem to think he’s actually holding that much cash.

        People are only buying Tesla stock because it keeps going up, nothing to do with their perceived value of future earnings. It’s fucking insane, reminds me of Wall Street, 1929. Fittingly enough, the world is making the same mistakes of 100 years ago because all the people who learned from those mistakes are dead.

    • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world
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      21 hours ago

      You can’t buy respect or admiration… Well he did for like 10-15 years, then he got high on his own narcissism and dropped the filter; plus a team of marketers manufacturing his image and curating his social media posts.

  • zib@lemmy.world
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    21 hours ago

    Imagine if 99% of his net worth were redistributed to the people who need it most and reivested in the economy. And even then, that asshole would still have $5 billion left over.

    • shalafi@lemmy.world
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      15 hours ago

      Almost all of that money is imaginary. Look at Tesla’s $1.5T “worth”. If you liquidated the company down to the staplers and pens, you’re probably only going to get a few billion.

      If we’re saying that $1.5T represents current assets and future growth, yikes. Tesla ain’t doing so hot and I hardly expect them to turn it around with this genius at the top. The stock price merely reflects people buying because people are buying. Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd! Someday that stock is going to crater.

      Anyway, same goes for Musk. He can turn but a fraction of that net worth into cash. Imagine if he started selling Tesla stock. First off, the market would panic seeing the CEO dumping his own stock, the price would plummet, instantly. Even if word didn’t get out, the market would still be flooded, driving the price into the ground.

      CAVEAT: None of this considers the value of SpaceX. 🤷🏻

      • Alexstarfire@lemmy.world
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        7 hours ago

        $1.5t is the market cap which is simply stock price x # of shares. It has no direct correlation to the assets of the company or the amount of profit it makes. People misunderstand market cap and what it means all the time.

  • crandlecan@mander.xyz
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    21 hours ago

    What happened with Tesla enduring mass boycots and losses due to Tittler’s involvement with Agent Orange? 😔

    • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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      21 hours ago

      For some weird reason it hasn’t affected the Tesla stock much?
      FSD is now a proven fiasco, together with obvious declining sales. But now people are buying the next big thing which is supposed to be his amateur robots and AI.
      Both areas where Tesla is even further behind than they are on FSD. But some people still refuse to believe Tesla is behind on FSD, despite the evidence is clear that they are.
      It’s all build on a scam, and a lot of people are still buying it.
      Elon Musk is not a genius at technology or business, he is just a genius scammer.

      • shalafi@lemmy.world
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        15 hours ago

        People are buying only because it’s a growth stock. Eventually enough people will get nervous and cause a stampede. Lots of owners are going to left holding the bag, an empty bag.

    • makeshiftreaper@lemmy.world
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      21 hours ago

      I’ve maintained that the stock market divorced itself from reality a long time ago. As of making this comment by market cap Toyota, BYD, Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, GM, Volkswagen, Ford, and Porsche COMBINED are worth $100 billion less than HALF of Tesla. Is there anyone out there that would choose a minority stake in Tesla vs owning 9 of the biggest auto manufacturers on the planet outright?

      Point being I don’t see stock valuation as a measure of how successful companies are. How high were stocks in the dot com boom? In 2008?

      • flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz
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        20 hours ago

        Stocks are basically the same as crypto at this point. There is no benefit or utility at owning some, the only value is the idea of selling for more at some point.

        • reddig33@lemmy.world
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          20 hours ago

          They could fix this by requiring stocks pay a dividend as a minimum percentage of profit, and prohibiting the sale of a stock until a year after purchase.

      • FlexibleToast@lemmy.world
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        20 hours ago

        The majority of investors now are “retail investors”. Just regular people on apps like Robinhood. These people are investing in memes or making political statements.

        • ℍ𝕂-𝟞𝟝@sopuli.xyz
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          19 hours ago

          Tesla is 47.91% owned by institutions, not retail. Add Musk’s 12%, and that leaves retail at most 40%.

          Tesla goes where institutions want it to go, since they are the only organised force on the market anyway.

        • makeshiftreaper@lemmy.world
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          20 hours ago

          I’m not trying to start a fight with you on this but by what metric do you measure that? To my knowledge institutional trading outpaces retail in terms of total dollars invested, number of trades, and total valuation (as in the total market value of the retail traders is more than the net worth of retail investors)

          • FlexibleToast@lemmy.world
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            18 hours ago

            I can’t find the source. I’m recalling a recent episode of TBOY podcast that talked about this. They cite their sources, but I’m not sure which episode it was. So, yeah without actual sources feel free to ignore what I said.

    • redsand@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      18 hours ago

      TSLA is heavily manipulated. Insiders have liquidated something like 100M in stock this year. They’re dead it just takes time, they don’t have a market for any vehicles anymore, the CT was a boondoggle, they have no new tech and are behind in every category now.

      Nissan is still operating, give it some time, people will continue to dump TSLA and Elon can’t liquidate more than a couple billion in a year without tanking the price.

      • JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz
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        15 hours ago

        Shockingly, boycotts don’t work if the actual customers don’t take part in them. Companies don’t care about your feelings, they care about money, and “I’m never buying a thing because of reasons!” doesn’t matter if you weren’t about to buy one in the first place.

        • FlexibleToast@lemmy.world
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          15 hours ago

          Correct. That’s why successful boycotts usually only happen because the company was already in decline. I would argue that the Disney/ABC situation was that.

      • palordrolap@fedia.io
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        20 hours ago

        Did you miss the whole Jimmy Kimmel thing? Disney cancelled him so people started cancelling their Disney subscriptions. Suddenly they reconsidered.

        Boycotts don’t always work, sure, but sometimes they do and that’s enough to prove that they’re worth trying in the first place.