Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
Elon Musk has a habit of saying things that sound absurd until they happen. So when Musk says becoming the world’s first quadrillionaire is “not impossible”, that track record earns the statement at least a look.
The answer, as it turns out, involves factories on the Moon, colonies on Mars, and a future in which the US dollar may no longer exist as a currency.
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FROM TRILLIONAIRE TO WHAT EXACTLY?
Musk became the world’s first trillionaire this week after SpaceX, his rocket and satellite company, went public in a blockbuster IPO that raised $75 billion, the largest in history.
His net worth now stands at an estimated $1.1 trillion, according to Forbes, placing him so far ahead of the next richest person on earth that the gap itself is staggering. Alphabet co-founder Larry Page comes in second at around $300 billion.
But a quadrillionaire?
That would require Musk to be worth $1,000,000,000,000,000, or one thousand trillion dollars. To put that in perspective, the entire global GDP as of 2026 stands at roughly $120 trillion. A quadrillionaire would be worth more than eight times the output of every country on earth combined.
When a post by the World of Statistics account on X pointed out that Musk would need another $998.9 trillion to reach that number, Musk did not dismiss it.
“Not impossible,” he wrote, reposting the claim.
WHAT WOULD IT ACTUALLY TAKE?
Musk was quick to add that becoming a quadrillionaire would require achievements that go well beyond anything the world has seen so far.
“Factories on the Moon and Mars to achieve,” he replied.
The logic, while extraordinary, is consistent with everything Musk has been building towards. SpaceX’s Starship rocket is designed to carry humans and cargo to Mars at a scale that makes colonisation viable.
Musk has long argued that becoming a multi-planetary species is not just a vanity project but a necessity for the survival of human civilisation.
If those colonies become real, and if they house factories producing goods and resources that can be sold back to earth or used to fuel interplanetary commerce, the economic scale involved would be unlike anything in human history. Whether that translates into personal wealth in any conventional sense is another question entirely.
BY THEN, DOLLARS MAY NOT EXIST
Musk himself seems to think the very idea of measuring wealth in dollars may be obsolete by the time quadrillionaire-level wealth becomes possible.
“By then, I don’t think dollars will be used as currency. Just mass and energy,” he said.
It is a striking statement from someone whose net worth is currently denominated in exactly those dollars. But it fits a worldview Musk has expressed across multiple interviews and podcasts over the past few years. He believes artificial intelligence and robotics will transform the global economy so fundamentally that traditional notions of money, work, and scarcity will no longer apply.
“AI and robots are going to make so much stuff and provide so many services that they’ll run out of things to do for humans,” Musk has said in past interviews.
In his vision, automated production will eventually drive the cost of most goods and services close to zero. When robots can do everything cheaper and faster than humans, wages lose their meaning and money itself starts to look like an outdated concept.
“I think money will stop being relevant at some point in the future,” Musk has said in earlier interviews.
To bridge the gap between the world we live in now and that automated future, In earlier public discussions, Musk has supported the idea of a universal high income, a step up from the universal basic income debate, where people would be guaranteed not just survival but a decent standard of living funded by the surplus generated by AI-driven production.
WHY IS ELON MUSK SO RICH?
Born in Pretoria, South Africa in 1971, Musk moved to North America and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997.
He became CEO of Tesla in 2008 and is widely credited with pushing the global automobile industry to take electric vehicles seriously.
Beyond Tesla and SpaceX, he has co-founded Neuralink, which is developing brain-computer interface technology, and The Boring Company, focused on tunnelling and transportation.
A significant chunk of his current fortune, roughly $866 billion, comes from his stake in SpaceX alone. His wealth also includes Tesla holdings and stock-based compensation packages that continue to vest. In 2022, he acquired Twitter for $44 billion and rebranded it as X, giving himself a direct line to hundreds of millions of users and a megaphone unlike anything any private individual has ever held.
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SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
