American billionaire Elon Musk’s fortune fell by about $68 billion in October, as a sell-off in artificial intelligence stocks wiped out the gains that had briefly made him a trillionaire again at the start of October.
Musk ended October with a net worth of about $865 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, after losing more than $48 billion on Oct. 30 alone. He remains the world’s richest person by a wide margin, but he is now roughly $175 billion below the $1.04 trillion he was worth in early October.
Most of the decline came from SpaceX, the rocket, satellite and AI company he controls. Its shares fell about 5.6% on Oct. 30 to close at $135.90, a nine-week low and just above the $135 price at which the company went public in June. The stock had climbed as high as $176.56 earlier in October, and SpaceX’s market value topped $2.3 trillion on Oct. 6. It ended the month about 10% lower than where it started and roughly 40% below its record of $225.64, set on June 16.
At that close, Musk’s SpaceX holding of about 4.77 billion shares and 350 million options was worth about $690 billion, more than $150 billion less than at the Oct. 6 peak. The shares are locked up until June 12, 2027, so he cannot sell any of them before then.
A month of swings
October started well for Musk. Tesla Inc., where he is chief executive and owns a stake of nearly 11%, reported better-than-expected third-quarter deliveries of 486,532 vehicles on Oct. 2, and a rally in SpaceX after the first successful orbital flight of its Starship rocket lifted him back above $1 trillion the following week.
The gains did not last. Musk lost his trillionaire status again on Oct. 8, as SpaceX and Tesla both fell. On Oct. 22, SpaceX shares dropped nearly 9% in a single session and his fortune shrank by about $74 billion that day, even though the company had just reported a 161% jump in quarterly revenue. About 1.3 billion SpaceX shares held by insiders and early investors also became free to trade that day, when a post-IPO lockup ended.
Tesla held up better than SpaceX. Its shares rose during October and ended the month near $400, helped by talk of a possible merger between Musk’s two largest companies. That cushioned only part of the hit from SpaceX, which accounts for most of his wealth.
AI sell-off hits the richest
The last week of October was among the worst of the year for technology stocks. Third-quarter results from Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc. revived concerns that spending on AI data centers is running far ahead of the revenue it brings in, and a weak forecast from Intel Corp. added to the pressure. Technology stocks lost more than $1 trillion in market value on Oct. 30, the last trading day of the month.
SpaceX is spending heavily on the same build-out. It spent $19.6 billion on capital projects in the third quarter and expects to spend $35 billion to $40 billion in the fourth. Its AI unit brought in $7.56 billion in revenue in the quarter, much of it from Anthropic PBC, the maker of the Claude chatbot.
Musk was not the only billionaire to take a hit. Alphabet shares fell about 12% on Oct. 29, cutting the fortunes of Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin by about $31 billion and $29 billion, respectively. On Oct. 30, Michael Dell lost about $17.5 billion as shares of Dell Technologies Inc. dropped about 10%, and Oracle Corp. co-founder Larry Ellison lost about $8.8 billion. Page overtook Dell as the world’s third-richest person, with a fortune of about $234 billion.