Elon Musk’s net worth catapulted back above $800 billion on Thursday, powered by a blistering 15.8% surge in SpaceX shares that capped a powerful two-day rally and added more than $327 billion in market value to the newly public space and communications giant.
The stock closed at $133.11 on August 7, according to market data, marking its highest level in three weeks and putting it within striking distance of its $135 initial public offering price for the first time since July. The gains pushed Musk’s fortune to $802 billion, Forbes calculated, less than two weeks after it had tumbled below $700 billion during a punishing post-earnings selloff.
Bloomberg data indicated the one-day wealth swing was roughly $96 billion, underscoring just how tightly Musk’s fortune is tethered to SpaceX’s volatile stock. He owns approximately 38% of the company, a stake that has turned him into the world’s first trillionaire on paper and then erased hundreds of billions of dollars in value within a matter of weeks.
The rebound arrived just two days after the expiration of SpaceX’s first post-listing lockup period, which freed roughly 911 million insider shares for trading on August 6. Several analysts had flagged that supply overhang as a significant downside risk for a stock already trading well below its mid-June record of $201.80. Instead, investors used the moment to pile back in, encouraged by a broadly positive reception to the company’s inaugural quarterly earnings report and a broader tech rally sparked by a weak July jobs report that showed the U.S. economy shedding 23,000 nonfarm payroll positions.
A Financial Juggernaut With Heavy Spending
The earnings release on August 4 revealed a company growing at breakneck speed while spending even faster. Second-quarter revenue jumped 92% to $7.81 billion, blowing past Wall Street forecasts near $6.9 billion. The net loss narrowed to $541 million from roughly $1 billion a year earlier, a sign that scale is beginning to improve the bottom line even as capital expenditure remains enormous.
Connectivity remained the dominant business segment. Starlink, the satellite internet service, nearly doubled its turnover and contributed more than $4.2 billion in revenue, with subscriber counts doubling to 12 million. Musk told analysts on the earnings call that Starlink is now the primary engine pulling the company toward an internal target of $1 trillion in annual revenue, a milestone he said the company now expects to reach by 2030 — a full year ahead of its previous 2031 forecast. He added that hitting the mark in 2029 is “not zero” probability.
Yet the sheer scale of investment required to chase that ambition rattled some investors on earnings day. Capital spending for the quarter reached $18.3 billion, more than six times the level of the prior-year period. The artificial intelligence segment alone absorbed $15.8 billion of that total, with connectivity and space operations accounting for the remainder. The company ended the quarter with more than $100 billion in cash and short-term investments, providing a substantial cushion for its spending trajectory.
Analysts Turn Sharply Bullish
Wall Street responded to the earnings and subsequent stock rebound with a flurry of bullish calls. Bernstein analyst Douglas Harned lifted his price target to $248 from $239, while Cantor Fitzgerald maintained an outlook of $246. Argus Research upgraded the stock to buy with a $160 target, and Citi kept its buy rating with a $200 target after the AI unit’s adjusted earnings beat internal estimates by nearly $1.5 billion.
The most aggressive voice on the Street remains Raymond James analyst Brian Gesuale, who held the highest target among major analysts at $800. Gesuale’s thesis rests on Starship, SpaceX’s next-generation launch system, which he argues can slash launch costs sharply enough to unlock entirely new markets across communications, AI infrastructure, manufacturing, and energy.
Consensus price targets still diverge across data providers, ranging from roughly $227 to $231, implying at least 70% upside from Friday’s close. Benzinga data showed that 37 of the 39 analysts tracking the company maintain a buy rating, with only two — CFRA and Philip Securities — holding sell ratings.
Not everyone is fully on board. Steve Westly, a former Tesla board member, has publicly questioned how fast SpaceX can realistically grow and how heavy its costs will run before meaningful profitability arrives. His caution echoes the core tension in the SpaceX story: staggering revenue growth paired with staggering capital demands.
The volatility in SpaceX shares — and by extension Musk’s fortune — has been extreme since the company’s June listing. Shares closed at a record $201.80 on June 16, when Musk’s wealth peaked near $1.33 trillion, according to Forbes. The stock then slid 46% to a low of $108.37 last week, with earnings-day selling on August 5 alone wiping roughly $87 billion from his net worth in a single session.
The two-day rally that followed added more than $327 billion in market capitalization, Bloomberg calculated, pulling the stock back toward its offering price and restoring a measure of calm. The broader tech sector joined the rally on August 7, with Palantir, Cloudflare, and Microchip Technology all posting sharp gains as investors rotated back into high-growth names following the soft jobs data.
Musk’s fortune now stands at levels that dwarf the combined wealth of Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, and Michael Dell, according to Bloomberg data. His net worth has climbed by roughly $198 billion since the start of 2026.
The Road Ahead
For investors, the SpaceX story presents a high-stakes calculus. The company is growing revenue at a pace that few firms of its size can match, driven by a satellite internet business that is scaling globally and an AI infrastructure buildout that shows no signs of slowing. Average analyst estimates call for revenue to reach $44 billion this year and $90 billion next year.
But the path to those figures runs through some of the heaviest capital spending in corporate history. The question Westly and others have raised is whether the returns will justify the investment before the cash cushion thins. Musk’s answer, delivered on the earnings call, was to accelerate the timeline to $1 trillion in sales.
Meanwhile, speculation about a potential merger between SpaceX and Tesla, which the company has denied, adds another layer of uncertainty. A recent report suggested Musk was preparing to sell Tesla’s Chinese business to clear the way for a deal, though no concrete steps have materialized.
For now, the market is betting that the growth story wins out. The lockup expiry that many feared would trigger a wave of insider selling instead became a buying opportunity. Whether that confidence holds will depend on SpaceX’s ability to keep delivering quarters like the one it just reported — and on whether the global economy cooperates.
The S&P 500 has climbed 13% in 2026 and sits at all-time highs, but warning signs are flashing. The cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio, or CAPE ratio, has climbed to roughly 41.4, a level approached only once in the last 150 years — during the dot-com era. Each time the CAPE ratio has risen steeply over a short period, history shows a market decline has followed. For a stock as volatile and richly valued as SpaceX, the broader market backdrop matters enormously.
Musk’s personal fortune, tied as it is to a single stock that has swung 46% from peak to trough in a matter of weeks, will remain a barometer of both the company’s execution and the market’s appetite for risk. The $800 billion threshold, breached again on Thursday, is a round number that captures both the scale of the ambition and the scale of the volatility.