Elon Musk makes almost all of his money from owning shares in the companies he leads, not from pay. At Tesla he beneficially owned 20.3% of the shares as of 31 December 2025 and takes no salary; at SpaceX, which now includes xAI and X and listed on Nasdaq in June 2026, he draws a base salary of $54,080 and controls about 82.4% of the votes. His wealth rises and falls with the value of those stakes and with huge performance awards that pay out only if the companies reach set market values and goals.
Tesla says Musk never accepted his salary and, at his request, stopped it altogether from May 2019. As of 31 December 2025 he beneficially owned 717.1 million Tesla shares, 20.3%, including 304.0 million shares under options from his 2018 award.
02
Tesla's 2025 award
Tesla's board granted Musk 423.7 million restricted shares in September 2025, approved by shareholders on 6 November 2025. They are earned in 12 tranches, the first at a $2.0 trillion market value plus an operating milestone; Tesla said none had been earned when it filed its 2025 compensation disclosure.
03
SpaceX: the larger stake
SpaceX's June 2026 prospectus says Musk would beneficially own 849.5 million Class A and 5,569.1 million Class B shares after the offering, and about 82.4% of the voting power. His base salary is $54,080, unchanged since 2019.
04
Earlier exits
Before SpaceX, Musk co-founded Zip2, acquired by Compaq in March 1999, and PayPal, acquired by eBay in October 2002.
What changed in 2025-26
SpaceX became public
SpaceX sold Class A shares on Nasdaq in June 2026 at $135 each, turning Musk’s largest private stake into a listed one. In the quarter to 30 September 2026 SpaceX reported revenue of $14,575 million and net income of $4.4 billion.
Mars and space data centres in his pay
In January 2026 SpaceX granted Musk 1,000 million restricted Class B shares that vest in 15 tranches only at market values from $500 billion to $7.5 trillion and once a permanent Mars colony has at least one million inhabitants. In March 2026 a separate AI award of 302.1 million shares was tied to non-Earth data centres delivering 100 terawatts of compute a year.
After the Delaware Supreme Court reinstated his 2018 Tesla award, an interim award of 96 million restricted shares granted in August 2025 was forfeited in full in April 2026, according to Tesla.
AI sits inside SpaceX
xAI, Grok and X are now part of SpaceX. AI is no longer a separate private company for Musk; it is a segment of the business he controls through SpaceX shares.
Musk's main sources of wealth
Tesla salary
What he holds or earnsNone
Sourced factNot accepted; stopped from May 2019
Tesla shares
What he holds or earns717.1 million shares incl. options
Sourced fact20.3% as of 31 December 2025
Tesla 2025 award
What he holds or earns423.7 million restricted shares
Sourced fact12 tranches from a $2.0 trillion market value
SpaceX salary
What he holds or earns$54,080 a year
Sourced factUnchanged since 2019
SpaceX shares
What he holds or earns849.5 million Class A and 5,569.1 million Class B
Sourced factAbout 82.4% of votes after the June 2026 IPO
What it means for you
Read 'net worth' headlines as share prices times stakes; most of Musk's wealth is stock he has not sold.
Check the proxy and prospectus, not estimates: Tesla's 10-K/A and SpaceX's prospectus list his exact holdings and awards.
For founders: Musk's pay shows the extreme form of equity-only compensation tied to company value.
For investors: note the control structure; Class B shares give Musk about 82.4% of SpaceX votes.
Treat older lists of 'Musk companies' with care: X and xAI now sit inside SpaceX.
The Business Engineer lens
Musk turns the market’s belief in his companies into personal wealth, and his newest awards tie that wealth to AI compute and Mars rather than to profits. The Business Engineer view is that SpaceX, now holding his AI business, has become the main engine of his fortune alongside Tesla.
He beneficially owned 717.1 million shares, or 20.3%, as of 31 December 2025, including options from his 2018 award.
How much does SpaceX pay Musk?
His base salary is $54,080, unchanged since 2019; most of his SpaceX pay is in performance awards tied to market value and goals such as a Mars colony.
Who controls SpaceX?
Musk. Its prospectus says he would hold about 82.4% of the voting power after the June 2026 offering, mostly through Class B shares.
The complete explainer, cleaned up and reformatted for mobile.
Last Updated: June 2026 — Enhanced with AI business impact analysis
Elon Musk is one of the wealthiest people in the world, with his ownership in Tesla making him worth more than two hundred billion dollars. The companies founded by Elon Musk range from electric vehicles and renewable energies, with Tesla, rockets, with SpaceX, infrastructure — as explored in the economics of AI compute infrastructure — with The Boring Company, and neurotechnology with Neuralink. In April 2022, Musk placed an acquisition offer for Twitter of about $44 billion, which was finalized and closed in October 2022.
Drawing by The Business Engineer.
Elon Musk Story
Perhaps counterintuitively, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk owes much of his financial success to not focusing on making money.
Musk has invested mainly in ideas he is passionate about, with the viability of an idea being a secondary concern to pursuing it.
As a child, he had a passion for code, selling the source code for his first video game for $500 at age 12.
In 1999 he founded X.com, one of the first FDIC-insured online banks in the world.
After seeing promise in its easy payment service, Musk merged his company with Confinity the following year.
In 2001, the company became PayPal and Musk became an 11.7% shareholder.
PayPal makes money primarily by processing customer transactions on the Payments Platform and other value-added services. Thus, the revenue streams are divided into transaction revenues based on the volume of activity or total payments volume. And value-added services, such as interest and fees earned on loans and interest receivable. As of 2020, PayPal generated over $21.5 billion in net revenues with a 25% operating margin.
He is also a proponent of the spend-money-to-make-money philosophy.
Indeed, Musk is a notorious workaholic who prefers to reinvest capital into his businesses over lavish vacations.
SpaceX
– SpaceX is a space transportation service and manufacturer of space rockets and other transport vehicles. Elon Musk founded it in 2002. – SpaceX makes money by charging governmental and commercial customers to send goods into space. These goods include ISS supplies, infrastructure, and people and satellites for various purposes. – SpaceX is also creating its Starlink network, designed to give every citizen access to fast and affordable internet.
Musk has always had a passion for space exploration. Even before the eBay acquisition of PayPal, he conceived of greenhouses to grow food crops on Mars.
Such was his passion that he traveled to Moscow to purchase intercontinental ballistic missiles that could send payloads into space.
In Moscow, however, Musk was seen as an amateur and rejected. Undeterred, he returned to the U.S. and founded SpaceX in 2002 using $100 million of his own capital.
In 2008, SpaceX received a $1.6 billion NASA contract for rockets to resupply the International Space Station.
The company then became the first to berth a private vehicle with the ISS.
Reusable rockets with large payloads were launched into space and successfully returned to Earth using SpaceX autonomous drone ships.
By March 2018, SpaceX had over 100 launches on its manifest worth approximately $12 billion in revenue. In 2021 SpaceX also won the $2.89 billion NASA program to carry American astronauts to the moon.
Tesla is vertically integrated. Therefore, the company runs and operates Tesla’s plants where cars are manufactured and the Gigafactory which produces the battery packs and stationary storage systems for its electric vehicles, which are sold via direct channels like the Tesla online store and the Tesla physical stores.
Tesla is perhaps the biggest accelerator of Elon Musk’s net worth. When the company debuted on the stock market in 2010, Musk instantly amassed a personal fortune of $2 billion.
Indirectly, the Tesla share price appreciation results from a new wave of younger investors and strong demand for electric vehicles – particularly from China.
Today Tesla is an electric empire which potential goes way beyond the automotive sector!
As an electric automaker and builder of sports cars and now trucks, Tesla’s competitors comprise companies like Ford, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Lamborghini, Audi, Rivian Lucid Motors, Toyota, and more. At the same time, Tesla is an electric energy production and storage company (SolarCity); it competes with Sunrun, SunPower, and Vivint Solar. And as an autonomous driving company, it competes with companies like Zoox, Waymo, and Baidu with self-driving software.
Twitter makes money in two ways: advertising and data licensing. In 2021, Twitter generated $4.5 billion from advertising and $570 million from data licensing. While Twitter generated $5 billion in total revenues, it lost 221 million.
In April 2022, Musk formalized an acquisition offer to take over Twitter for $44 billion.
This deal has been the most discussed business deal of the decade, as it was openly debated over Twitter.
After a battle of a few months, which seemed to sink the deal, eventually, the deal closed by October 2022, thus giving Elon Musk full ownership of Twitter!
Twitter, renamed X, was later acquired by Musk’s xAI (effective 28 March 2025), and xAI became part of SpaceX in February 2026.
Key takeaways
Elon Musk has made most of his money by investing in ideas and companies he is passionate about. After eBay acquired PayPal, he used his significant stake in the company to fund the creation of SpaceX.
After initial teething problems, SpaceX grew to become a company with 100 launches on its manifest worth $12 billion. The company has also made Musk money through several multi-billion dollar contracts with NASA.
Tesla and its rapidly appreciating share price are responsible for much of Musk’s net worth. A sizeable shareholding combined with an influx of young investors and favorable legislation has seen Musk become one of the world’s wealthiest men.
Elon Musk, seen as one of the most visionary tech entrepreneurs from the Silicon Valley scene, started his “career” as an entrepreneur at an early age. After selling his first startup, Zip2, in 1999, he made $22 million, which he used to found X.com, which would later become PayPal, and sell for over a billion to eBay (Musk made $180 million from the deal). He founded other companies like Tesla (he didn’t start it but became a major investor in the early years) and SpaceX. Tesla started as an electric sports car niche player, eventually turned into a mass manufacturing electric car maker.
Elon Musk, an early investor and CEO of Tesla since October 2008, beneficially owned 20.3% of Tesla’s shares as of 31 December 2025, including options from his 2018 award. Vanguard held 6.1% and BlackRock 5.0% (Tesla 10-K/A for fiscal 2025).
Founded in 2003 by Eberhard and Tarpenning, eventually, the initial co-founders left the company, and by 2004, Musk first became the main investor. After that, by 2008, he took over as CEO of the company. Tesla would go through many near-death experiences until 2018. And yet, by 2021, Tesla will become a trillion-dollar company.
Tesla is vertically integrated. Therefore, the company runs and operates the Tesla’s plants where cars are manufactured and the Gigafactory, which produces the battery packs and stationary storage systems for its electric vehicles, which are sold via direct channels like the Tesla online store and the Tesla physical stores.
As an electric automaker and builder of sports cars and now trucks, Tesla’s competitors comprise companies like Ford, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Lamborghini, Audi, Rivian Lucid Motors, Toyota, and more. At the same time, Tesla is an electric energy production and storage company (SolarCity); it competes with Sunrun, SunPower, and Vivint Solar. And as an autonomous driving company, it competes with companies like Zoox, Waymo, and Baidu with self-driving software.
A real-time insurance business model enables Tesla to build its insurance arm by dynamically adjusting the premiums based on real-time driving behavior. Reduced insurance premiums hooked with the leasing arm enable Tesla to scale its demand side of the business.
In 2021, Tesla generated over $53.8 billion in revenues, compared to $31.5 billion in 2020. The largest segment in automotive sales (comprising regulatory credits revenues), followed by leasing (as part of the automotive), generated $1.6 billion in 2021. Outside automotive sales (non-warranty after-sales vehicle services, sales of used vehicles, retail merchandise, and more) accounted for $3.8 billion. And energy generation and storage accounted for $2.8 billion. US and China are the primary markets, with almost $24 billion and nearly $14 billion, respectively, in 2021. In 2021, Tesla generated $5.6 billion in Net Income, a net margin of over 10%.
Twitter makes money in two ways: advertising and data licensing. In 2021, Twitter generated $4.5 billion from advertising and $570 million from data licensing. While Twitter generated $5 billion in total revenues, it lost 221 million.
AI is fundamentally reshaping Musk’s business empire across multiple fronts, creating new revenue streams while transforming existing operations.
At X (formerly Twitter), Musk has integrated AI through Grok, the platform’s chatbot powered by his xAI venture, creating potential subscription tiers and enterprise AI services. Meanwhile, xAI itself raised $6 billion in 2024, positioning Musk to compete directly with OpenAI and Google in the lucrative AI foundation model market.
SpaceX leverages AI for autonomous rocket landing systems and satellite constellation management for Starlink, reducing operational costs while improving service reliability. Neuralink’s brain-computer interface technology represents the intersection of AI and biotechnology, potentially unlocking entirely new markets in medical devices and human augmentation.
The convergence of these AI capabilities across Musk’s portfolio creates unique synergies—from Tesla’s AI chips potentially powering xAI’s models to Starlink providing the infrastructure for global AI deployment.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
