Trillionaire Elon Musk now has enough money to buy Houston

It's hard to imagine, Wolf, one trillion as a number, let alone the amount of money someone is about to be worth. So here's some context. One trillion has 12 zeros. It's one million million dollars. And if you spent one million dollars every hour, every day, it would still take you more than a century to spend it. From an economic standpoint, only 20 countries have economies larger than one point one trillion dollars. And that means the vast majority of nations have an economy worth less than Elon Musk. Some of them include Taiwan, Ireland, Sweden, and Musk's native South Africa. Musk could theoretically buy all of the property in Houston, both residential and commercial, and still have money left over. He could buy the 16.3 million dollar, 6.3 million new cars bought by Americans last year and still have money left over. And if sports is more of your thing, Elon Musk, get this, he could buy all 50 of the most valuable teams from around the world for a cool 353 billion dollars. Elon Musk is the first trillionaire in human history. Just minutes ago, SpaceX began trading and immediately jumped by more than 20 percent. And that has made Musk a trillionaire. A trillion dollars. That is a one with 12 zeros after it. If you spend a million dollars a day, it will take you more than 2700 years to spend it all. Musk celebrated the first day of trading the company that makes up most of his wealth this morning. I, too, would be cheering. My next guest has been following Musk's career for years. Corey Johnson joins me now, chief market strategist of Epistrophe Capital Research, and previously a financial journalist with CNBC, my former colleague at Bloomberg, who has interviewed Musk many times. Corey, I want to start with the kind of headline of Elon Musk, now a trillionaire, that is more than the GDP of over 160 countries. These are just like random. It's like Sweden, Ireland, Belgium, Singapore, Argentina. What's the Cliff Snow's version of how did he get here? He got here by starting businesses and convincing people that the value of those businesses is greater than the performance that they've had thus far. He sells a dream and he sold it better than anyone in the history of mankind. To that point, you know, the valuation here, what we've seen market wise just today, obviously up 20 percent since the stock actually started trading on the Nasdaq. Is this about Starlink cash flow? Is this about rockets? Is this about what may become of X AI that's currently hemorrhaging cash? What are the fundamentals here? I mean, the fundamentals looking backwards aren't great. Well, let me phrase that. It's amazing what Elon Musk has done. It is amazing that they've put up built a private rocket company doing billions in revenues. It's amazing that they've created a way to get Internet service into rural areas, areas using satellites. Their AI business has not been amazing. It's been, you know, kind of really trailed what some of the other companies have done in that sector. But all of these businesses in total have lost a lot of money. So what's happening at this moment with the trading of the stock for the first time ever is regular investors and institutions are now getting on the risk train. Well, some of the insiders at SpaceX are getting off. Insiders are selling billions of dollars worth of stock over into today and into the next few days and weeks and months. They're moving the risk into the public. The public is saying, I want to take the bet with Elon Musk that this business is going to be much greater than it is today. To that point, you know, NASDAQ actually changed its rules for this IPO in a way that could mean index funds, common holding and retirement accounts will be investing in SpaceX much earlier than they typically would. What does that mean for everyday investors and what does it mean for Musk? I think for it, well, for Musk, it means that the stock is going to go up even more. And it means that there is going to be forced buying of this stock because of the mechanisms of Wall Street. Now, many people's retirements are tied into index funds, not the S&P 500, but the NASDAQ 100 and similar index funds. They will be required to own SpaceX really quickly in an unusual way. And because of that requirement, lots of investors are going to lots of people's retirements are going to be tied to SpaceX, whether they want it to be or not, because they're tied to the markets. The market is going to be tied to those rockets strapped on for whatever volatility is to come in the future here. I keep thinking about like if a if a rocket blows up, which, by the way, is just part of the it's not knocking SpaceX, it happens given what they're trying to do. Like the market gyrations that will follow that. I don't I don't actually have a question here. I've just been trying to think through. That seems like a risky place given potential volatility there. There's something to that, right? This is volatility and it is a business. Elon Musk has embraced volatility maybe more than a lot of other CEOs have. And it has paid off for him often and paid off wonderfully at Tesla. Tesla is going to be a great, a very big company, almost a great big company. I wouldn't say it's a great company. It's a very big company. When he bought Twitter, it worked the other way. Twitter has really fallen dramatically under his ownership. The bet here is that things will go better. I think it's important, especially for your and especially for this show, Inside Politics, to recognize that the U.S. government is closely tied into this big company. About 20, more than 20 percent of revenues, which is to say one out of every five dollars has of the revenues for SpaceX come from the U.S. government, comes from U.S. taxpayers. Over 10 billion dollars in just the last three years or just under 10 billion has come from the U.S. government. The U.S. government has given SpaceX 10 billion dollars. And now Elon Musk is a trillionaire. I think that that's a relevant fact politically. Your panel and your show knows this better than I do. But I think that, you know, it's important to understand this is a business where government contracts have been a huge chunk of the business from the very beginning. And the success of that business is now being turned or the lack of success has been being turned over to shareholders in the markets. But the beneficiary, more than anyone else, is Elon Musk. SpaceX's debut is going to top the previous record. Twenty nine point four billion raised by the oil giant Saudi Aramco back in 2019. The eye popping figures really come as the global race has sent startups to what are, you know, pretty eye watering valuations even before they go public or make a profit. CNN's Paul Newton has that part of the story. Flight directors go for launch. From ground rattling rocket launches to a record shattering Nasdaq IPO, investors are suiting up for SpaceX under ticker symbol SPCX. Space industry investors call it a transformative event. I don't think that there is a comparable company to benchmark SpaceX against. I think you have to go back to the 1900s and the vertically integrated industrial giants like Standard Oil, Ford, to sort of understand the magnitude of what's happening here. Welcome to SpaceX. It's been a supersonic ride from SpaceX's early days to this IPO. That's my office over there. Elon Musk founded the company back in 2002. Twenty four years later, SpaceX generates billions in revenues from its satellite Internet service Starlink and its rocket contracts with the U.S. government, one of its largest clients. It is, however, currently unprofitable, with twenty twenty five losses of some five billion dollars. Some Wall Street watchers fear turbulent times for the stock. I would personally stay away from it because it's too risky. It's it's too highly valued already compared to the underlying business. The good business in here is Starlink. But will it grow sufficiently to justify, which probably by then will be a two and a half trillion dollar valuation, three trillion dollar valuation? Possibly. I doubt it. SpaceX, however, believes the sky's the limit. Its IPO perspective sees a head spinning twenty eight and a half trillion dollars in potential revenues. It's looking to build a network of artificial intelligence data centers in space, and it will work to perfect its next generation Starship rocket. I don't think it's possible to understate how important Starship is. A whole economy is waiting for this vehicle to be able to do all kinds of new things in space. People are designing large satellites right now that need Starship to get there. Elon Musk himself is a true Starship believer. This is a spaceship that is designed to make life multi-planetary, to carry millions of people across the heavens to another planet. Musk has a lot of money riding on SpaceX IPO as it rockets him to trillionaire territory. His biggest corporate payout, however, comes later when and if SpaceX establishes, get this, a permanent human colony on Mars with one million inhabitants. Sky high, perhaps high in the sky ambitions for a company that has caught the attention of global investors hoping for heavenly returns. Paul Newton, CNN, New York.