Elon Musk‘s run as the world’s first trillionaire is over, and it lasted less than two weeks. The richest person on the planet slipped back below the $1 trillion mark after a brutal tech sell-off knocked the wind out of both SpaceX and Tesla, the two companies that hold up almost his entire fortune. As of Tuesday, June 23, Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index pegged his net worth at $957 billion, down from a peak of roughly $1.32 trillion reached on June 16. That’s a paper loss of more than $360 billion in a matter of days, and it traces back to a sell-off that first caught fire when Accenture spooked investors with weak guidance.The damage was concentrated where Musk is most exposed. SpaceX, freshly public and wildly hyped, shed more than 30% from its mid-June high. Tesla added to the bleed with a 5.8% drop on Tuesday. Together they did what no rival fortune could come close to doing: they erased Musk’s trillionaire title almost as fast as he earned it.
How a consulting firm’s bad day rippled into a global rout
It started with Accenture. The consulting giant lowered its fiscal 2026 revenue growth forecast to 3-4%, and its shares slid on Wall Street, dragging Indian IT stocks down with them and reviving an old fear that companies are still holding back on discretionary tech spending. From there the selling spread. By Tuesday, a broader tech rout was in full swing, fuelled by mounting worries about an AI bubble and stubbornly high interest rates. The tech-heavy Nasdaq closed 2.2% lower, while Nvidia, AMD and other chip names took hits of their own.SpaceX, barely 11 days into life as a public company, bore the brunt. The stock had priced its IPO at $135, opened at $150 on June 12, and then rocketed to an intraday high of $225.64 on June 16, briefly pushing its valuation toward $3 trillion. That was the top. Shares fell every session after, sliding to around $156 by Tuesday’s close. A 16% single-day plunge on Monday alone wiped roughly $240 billion off Musk’s balance sheet.
Why Musk’s wealth fell harder than anyone else’s
Musk’s problem isn’t just that the market dropped. It’s that his fortune is built almost entirely on two stocks. SpaceX accounts for nearly 80% of his net worth, with his stake valued at $744 billion as of Tuesday. Tesla, worth another $158 billion, makes up most of the rest. There’s little else to cushion the fall. When both companies slide on the same week, there’s nothing to absorb the shock, which is why a sell-off that bruised most billionaires effectively detonated his trillionaire status.It didn’t help that SpaceX gave investors fresh reasons to pause. On Monday the company began pitching its first investment-grade bond sale, looking to borrow billions barely a week after raising money through its IPO. That reignited concerns about the enormous spending fuelling AI infrastructure across debt and equity markets. SpaceX’s own S-1 filing didn’t soothe nerves either: it revealed a $4.9 billion loss in 2025, with the company’s AI division alone burning through $12.7 billion in capital spending.
What comes next for SpaceX and Musk’s fortune
The next real test arrives when the lockup period expires and early investors and employees are finally cleared to sell. How the stock holds up then will say a lot about whether the enthusiasm was real or just opening-week froth. Analysts have flagged SpaceX’s lofty promises, from orbital data centres to Mars colonisation, as the kind of moonshot pitch that struggles to justify a near-$2 trillion valuation. S&P Global Ratings expects the company to stay cash-flow negative until 2029.For now, none of it dents Musk’s standing at the top. His fortune still towers over the next richest person, Google co-founder Larry Page, who sits around $297 billion, a gap of roughly $660 billion. And here’s the kicker: a modest 6% bounce in SpaceX would lift Musk back above $1 trillion. He may yet become the world’s first repeat trillionaire, which would make this whole episode less a fall from grace than a quick trip back to the launchpad.