The world could gain its first ever trillionaire this week, as Elon Musk takes his rocket and satellite company SpaceX public Friday in the biggest IPO in history. His wealth explosion has inspired his devotees, exhilarated his investors, vexed the skeptical and enraged those calling for higher taxes on the ultra-rich.
Yet the making of the world’s first trillionaire, if sudden—Musk was worth less than $25 billion just six years ago and $150 billion five years ago—has always been inevitable.
America has been marching toward this moment since John Jacob Astor arrived in the new nation in the 1780s and began trading in fur, tea and Manhattan real estate, likely becoming the first self-made millionaire in the process. American ingenuity soon swelled the millionaire class to include titans of tobacco, steel, banking, even refrigerated railcars.
It took more than a century to go from first millionaire to first billionaire. But by 1918, when a five-month-old Forbes magazine surveyed “the foremost bankers in the country,” John D. Rockefeller had achieved the feat, having amassed a fortune of $1.2 billion (roughly $29 billion in today’s dollars). “Mr. Rockefeller’s wealth,” Forbes founder B.C. Forbes wrote at the time, “if it could be turned into cash and distributed equally—which it couldn’t—would give every man, woman and child in the United States $10 [$240 today].” (If Musk’s money were similarly turned into cash and distributed, each American would get $2,300.)
Henry Ford soon followed Rockefeller, yet for much of the 20th century, as corporate America developed but taxes on the wealthy remained high, billionaires were few and far between. A handful of famous faces captured imaginations: the eccentric Howard Hughes dazzled the public with aviation feats and Hollywood romances. “He wanted to be the top golfer, the top aviator, he wanted to establish records,” said the former longtime head of Hughes’ business empire, in an interview with Forbes about his tell-all book that criticized Hughes for, among other things, finding clever ways to dodge taxes. J. Paul Getty made a fortune in oil and became famous for his secrecy and frugality. Aristotle Onassis, part of a rising group of shipping billionaires Forbes profiled in 1970, captured worldwide attention with his 1968 marriage to Jackie Kennedy. “Sealords, often billionaires—at least on paper—move in a rarefied world of kings, prime ministers, oil-rich sheiks, merchant princes, international bankers and just the wealthiest of businessmen,” Forbes wrote at the time. “This world is, for most of them, supranational and apolitical. Having few—if any—taxes, it has few—if any national loyalties. These men understand the wealthy traveler in ancient Greece who, when asked his nationality, replied: ‘I am of the rich.’”
America’s billionaire population stood at just 13 when Forbes published the inaugural Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans in 1982. The richest person in the United States then was shipping magnate Daniel Ludwig, worth $2 billion—or $6.9 billion in today’s dollars, a sum that would rank Ludwig as the 214th-wealthiest person in America today, tied with the cofounder of Little Caesars pizza and three heirs to the Meijer superstores chain. But by then the billionaire boom was off to the races.
By 1987, when Forbes published the first World’s Billionaires list, we found 140 ten-figure fortunes around the globe worth $295 billion combined, including more than 40 Americans. The billionaire population doubled to 291 within five years, then stretched to nearly 500 as the dotcom bubble inflated fortunes in the late 1990s. With Microsoft stock soaring, Bill Gates hit a number of milestones, becoming the first person worth $25 billion by 1997, then $50 billion by 1998, then, for a brief moment in 1999 before the market crashed, $100 billion.
It took nearly two decades—until Jeff Bezos in 2017, a century after the appearance of the first billionaire—for someone else to hit $100 billion. Then it took Bezos just three years to double it, becoming the first person ever worth $200 billion amid a runup in Amazon stock in 2020.
PEAK FORTUNES IN AMERICAN HISTORY
1918John D. Rockefeller is featured in Forbes as world’s first and only billionaire.
1982First Forbes 400 ranking of richest Americans published, featuring 13 billionaires. The richest is shipping magnate Daniel K. Ludwig, worth an estimated $2 billion.
Images Press/Getty Images
1998-1999Bill Gates becomes first person worth $50 billion and then (briefly) $100 billion before the dotcom bubble bursts in 2000.
Dick Barnatt/Getty Images
2017Jeff Bezos becomes the second ever centibillionaire and overtakes Gates as world’s richest person for the first time.
IAN LANGSDON/Getty Images; Dennis Van Tine/WENN/Newscom
2020Bezos is the first person to hit the $200 billion net worth mark, despite giving up a quarter of his Amazon stock in his 2019 divorce from MacKenzie Scott.
2021Elon Musk overtakes Bezos as world’s richest person for the first time and briefly becomes the first person worth $300 billion.
Patrick Pleul/Getty Images; Paul Ellis/Pool/Getty-Images
2024After ceding the title of the world’s wealthiest person to French luxury goods mogul Bernard Arnault for much of 2023 and 2024, Musk regains the top spot and becomes the first person worth $400 billion in December 2024.
Kent Nishimura/Getty Images; Christian Liewig Corbis/Getty Images
2025Larry Ellison briefly becomes the only other person ever worth $400 billion. Musk hits the $500 billion, $600 billion and $700 billion net worth marks over three months from October to December.
2026Musk is the first person to hit the $800 billion net worth mark in February. Anticipation for Musk becoming first trillionaire grows after SpaceX files to go public on June 12.
Now Musk’s rise makes those numbers almost seem small. He first debuted on Forbes’ annual World’s Billionaires list in 2012, two years after taking Tesla public, with an estimated net worth of $2 billion, good for 634th spot on the ranking. Within nine years he was the planet’s richest person, worth nearly $190 billion in January 2021 as Tesla’s shares had soared by more than 20,000% since IPO. In late 2021, he became the first person ever worth $300 billion.
Musk spent a couple years trading the wealth crown back and forth with Bezos and French luxury goods mogul Bernard Arnault, but has kept an iron grip on the title since June 2024. Thanks to Tesla’s high-revving price and SpaceX’s skyrocketing valuation, Musk became the first person ever worth $400 billion in December 2024, $500 billion in October, $600 billion and $700 billion in September, and $800 billion in February.
It’s not just Musk—billionaires everywhere are smashing records. In March, Forbes found that the planet added more than one new billionaire per day over the past year. There are now a record 3,400-plus billionaires worldwide, up 50% from a decade ago. They’re worth $20 trillion combined, up from $7.7 trillion in 2017. A record 19 people are now worth $100 billion or more, each of them at least three times richer than Rockefeller was in 1918, even after adjusting for inflation. Larry Page, the world’s second-richest person, is worth an estimated $291 billion—as much as all the world’s billionaires in 1987 combined and nearly twice as much as Bill Gates at the peak of the dotcom bubble. Page’s fortune has more than tripled in three years. His cofounder Sergey Brin is nearly just as rich.
The pace just keeps quickening. Sports stars are now earning their way into the billionaire ranks. Prediction markets are capturing huge valuations. There seems to be unlimited demand for any business with any tie whatsoever to AI—from chips to chatbots to data centers. Taylor Swift spent a year and a half as the world’s richest self-made woman billionaire, until Lucy Guo of Scale AI unseated her—for eight months, until Kalshi’s Luana Lopes Lara joined the billionaire ranks. Guo’s cofounder Alexandr Wang, meanwhile, became the youngest self-made billionaire of all in 2024. Then came Shayne Coplan of Polymarket last October. Coplan held the distinction only until 22-year-old Mercor cofounder Surya Midha became a billionaire—20 days later.
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