Stock Market
By Pankaj K
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From Trillionaire to $700 Billion and Back. The numbers here are genuinely wild. Forbes currently puts Musk's net worth at roughly $908 billion.
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What Sanders and Musk Actually Agree On (Sort Of). Neither of them controls the number. That's probably the strangest part of this whole debate.
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SpaceX's Nasdaq Debut Adds New Complexity. Before SPCX started trading in June, SpaceX's valuation was essentially a private-market estimate.
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Elon Musk pushed back. Hard. After Senator Bernie Sanders went public with fresh criticism about Musk's staggering wealth, Musk's response was pretty much the same line he's used…
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Sanders had zeroed in on a familiar target: the gap between Musk's fortune and what the bottom half of American households actually own.
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Musk's counter was blunt: when SpaceX and Tesla grow, their stock goes up, and that rising value doesn't just help him. Pension funds hold these shares.
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The numbers here are genuinely wild. Forbes currently puts Musk's net worth at roughly $908 billion. But earlier this year it was higher — around $1.
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That kind of swing — hundreds of billions of dollars in a matter of weeks — is basically the whole story of stock-based wealth. It's not stable. It's not predictable.
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SpaceX added a new variable to all of this. The company began trading on the Nasdaq in June under the ticker SPCX, with shares initially priced at $135.
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Neither of them controls the number. That's probably the strangest part of this whole debate. Market forces set Musk's valuation every single trading day.
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See also: Pineapple Financial Moves $1 Billion in Mortgages to Injective, PAPL0 Token Soars 48%
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And that's kind of the core tension. Sanders frames the wealth gap as a policy failure that demands a fix.
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Whether that argument holds up is another matter. Critics of Musk's position would say stock-based wealth still confers enormous real-world power and influence, even if it isn't…
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Mamdani and El-Sayed, both aligned with Sanders on wealth taxes, seem to think the liquid-versus-stock distinction is a dodge. Sanders hasn't backed down either.
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More context: Bitcoin ETFs Surge with $3.8 Billion in Three Weeks, BlackRock Dominates Flows
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