Oracle and Tesla were among the most prominent market capitalisation movers on Friday, as investors digested sharp swings in the valuations of companies linked to two of the world's wealthiest entrepreneurs. The movements came as Elon Musk lost his trillionaire status just three days after first achieving it, underscoring the volatility that can accompany concentrated ownership in publicly traded firms.
Musk's net worth fell from a recent high of $1.05 trillion on Tuesday to $987 billion on Thursday, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index. The decline followed a 3.5% drop in SpaceX shares, which traded below $162, while Tesla stock also fell more than 2%. Forbes estimated that Musk lost $21 billion on Wednesday morning alone when SpaceX shares declined after reports that the company plans to raise $40 billion to purchase Nvidia chips. The strategy may have raised concerns about spending needs and debt load, even as the company invests heavily in artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The reversal came after Musk regained trillionaire status on Monday, when SpaceX shares rose nearly 8% at the start of the week. Morgan Stanley analysts described the stock as «cheap» at those prices. Because Musk owns around 4.76 billion SpaceX shares, including another 1.3 billion unvested restricted shares, his net worth climbed from $976.9 billion to $1.04 trillion. The subsequent $63 billion loss illustrates how quickly such fortunes can change.
Musk has consistently argued that his wealth is not liquid. «Trillionaire represents some percentage ownership in companies that I built, and it's not sitting in a bank account,» he said in an interview with entrepreneur Peter Diamandis earlier this year, about three months before first becoming a trillionaire following SpaceX's IPO in June. «I own a percentage of the companies. The companies are doing lots of useful things, the value of the company grows. I own a percentage of the companies, and that sums up to that number, which seems high.»
Oracle founder Larry Ellison offers a parallel case. Ellison briefly dethroned Musk as the world's richest person last year after Oracle's breakout earnings report sent shares soaring 36%. The 82-year-old, who owns 40% of Oracle, experienced a $101 billion wealth surge. But his net worth fell by an estimated $34 billion just two days after the stock surge, while Musk enjoyed a $35 billion gain, putting him back on top. Other tech billionaires have seen similar swings: Michael Dell gained around $122 billion between September of this year and the same time in 2025, nearly doubling his wealth, while Larry Page's net worth grew $16.3 billion in the same period and Jeff Bezos watched his wealth surge $24.5 billion.
Ray Dalio, the billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates, has echoed Musk in arguing that paper wealth and spendable money are different things. «Wealth is not the same as money,» Dalio said on Steven Bartlett's The Diary of a CEO podcast earlier this year. «You see a lot of people getting wealthy but you can't spend the wealth. You have to sell the wealth to get money because you can only spend money.»
Musk has also predicted that monetary wealth will become less meaningful within a decade due to advances in artificial intelligence. «Money won't matter in 2036,» he told The Economist, arguing that AI would take over so much human work that jobs would become voluntary and cash itself irrelevant. He has proposed the idea of «universal high income» to distribute money in a non-working world, drawing inspiration from Iain M. Banks' Culture sci-fi novels. «In those books, money doesn't exist. It's kind of interesting,» Musk said on the Moonshots with Peter Diamandis podcast earlier this year. «And my guess is, if you go out long enough—assuming there's a continued improvement in AI and robotics, which seems likely—money will stop being relevant.»
For now, however, the market capitalisation movements of Oracle, Tesla and SpaceX remain closely tied to the fortunes of their founders, and Friday's trading reflected that reality.