Elon Musk Lost $363 Billion in a Single Month — and He's Still Worth $690 Billion

Elon Musk made history in June by becoming the world's first trillionaire. By August, he had shed $363 billion — a single-month loss larger than the entire fortune of anyone else in the global top ten — and was still the richest person on earth.

According to Forbes, shares of SpaceX, which had surged as much as 67% above their IPO price after the company went public on the Nasdaq on June 12, sank 37% in July. That alone carved $320 billion off Musk's net worth. Tesla compounded the damage, sliding 26% during the month after reporting second-quarter earnings that missed analyst expectations on July 22, costing Musk another $43 billion. As of August 1, 2026, Forbes estimates his net worth at $690 billion — the lowest it has been since December.

The dollar figures involved are almost impossible to contextualize through normal financial benchmarks, so consider this one: Musk's July loss of $363 billion exceeds the combined GDP of many mid-sized economies, and it is larger than the entire net worth of No. 2-ranked Larry Page, whose fortune Forbes estimates at $292 billion.

The volatility illustrates a structural reality of how extreme wealth works at this scale. Musk's fortune is overwhelmingly concentrated in two publicly traded or recently-listed companies. Forbes values his 38% stake in SpaceX — which now carries a market cap of $1.5 trillion after absorbing his AI and social media company xAI — at $552 billion. His roughly 11% stake in Tesla accounts for most of the rest. When either stock moves sharply, his net worth moves with it, in either direction, by amounts that dwarf the annual budgets of most governments.

Forbes also notes that its calculation of Musk's net worth deliberately excludes approximately $95 billion in restricted Tesla stock — shares converted from his 2018 CEO performance award, which was voided by a Delaware court in 2024 and restored on appeal in 2025. Under a new agreement reached in April, Musk exercised the options in June but will forfeit the resulting restricted shares unless he remains at Tesla in a senior role through January 2028. Forbes applies its standard methodology for unvested restricted stock and leaves those shares out of the tally.

Also excluded from Forbes' estimate: performance-based restricted shares that could eventually lift Musk's stakes in SpaceX and Tesla to as much as 47% and 29%, respectively — contingent on targets that include growing each company's market cap into the multi-trillions and establishing a permanent human colony of at least one million people on Mars.

While Musk dominated the headlines, July reshuffled the rest of the top ten in meaningful ways. Jeff Bezos was the month's biggest winner outside of Musk's orbit, gaining $29 billion as Amazon shares climbed 14%, pushing his estimated net worth to $278 billion and returning him to the No. 3 spot for the first time since March, according to Forbes. He leapfrogged Sergey Brin, who fell to No. 4 despite also gaining $1 billion, to an estimated $269 billion. Larry Ellison was the month's second-biggest loser after Musk, dropping $24 billion to an estimated $168 billion as Oracle stock fell 11%, sliding him from No. 7 to No. 8 and swapping places with Nvidia's Jensen Huang, whose net worth ticked up $1 billion to $174 billion.

The monthly turbulence sits against a backdrop of record-breaking annual growth. The 40th Forbes billionaire list, published in March 2026, counted 3,428 billionaires worldwide — a record — with a combined net worth of $20.1 trillion, according to Wikipedia's summary of the list. That represents an increase of 309 people and roughly $4 trillion compared to the 2025 list. For context, the 2020 list, compiled just as the COVID-19 pandemic was taking hold, counted 2,095 billionaires worth a combined $8 trillion. The billionaire population has grown by more than 60% in six years, and collective wealth has more than doubled.

Forbes has tracked the world's billionaires since 1987, building its annual list through a team of more than 50 reporters who scrutinize business deals, estimate the value of private assets, and price publicly traded stakes to market roughly a month before publication. The methodology explicitly excludes royalty and political leaders whose wealth derives from their positions, as well as individuals whose holdings cannot be sufficiently verified. Because stock prices move daily, Forbes also maintains a real-time billionaires tracker that updates continuously between annual snapshots — which is why the August figures differ from the March list.

Why it matters — The scale of Musk's single-month loss — and the fact that he remains the world's richest person despite it — reveals how concentration of wealth in a handful of volatile tech stocks can move sums that dwarf entire national economies, raising ongoing questions about market stability and the accuracy of net worth rankings built on fluctuating share prices.

Reported by wikipedia.org, forbes.com