The following appeared in the "Reno Evening Gazette," Jan. 4, 1964.
“When Dean [Martin], Frank [Sinatra] and their buddy Sammy Davis Jr. appeared at the Las Vegas Sands' 11th anniversary, Dean bowed to Frank and said: "It's your world, Frank; I just live in it."
Today’s version: It’s your world, Elon; I just live in it.
Elon Musk has been compared to everyone from Steve Jobs to Howard Hughes to Thomas Edison and of course Tony Stark, but Sinatra fits too. Old Blue Eyes may have been "king of the world," "top of the heap," and had his detractors. But Musk’s influence extends far beyond Sinatra's. As a global icon and a businessperson, Musk has vastly more power than a pop culture figure.
I’m not judging Musk and his actions here — a bloodsport on Twitter and elsewhere — but stating this as a matter of fact. My point is Musk’s empire, wealth and agency have never been stronger, greater and higher— and they probably haven’t peaked either. Let’s take a look at each.
Empire
Musk famously controls and/or holds sway over a family of companies, including two giant disruptors: Tesla (TSLA), and SpaceX, as well as The Boring Company, Neuralink and OpenAI. Then there are subsidiary companies — for instance Starlink in the case of SpaceX and Tesla Energy in the case of Tesla. Consider too, the additional companies Musk helped found and or invested in which include, Zip2, (bought by Compaq — which was bought by HP), PayPal, and DeepMind (bought by Google), and the companies founded by employees who’ve left these endeavors.
SpaceX, privately held, is worth over $100 billion, (up from $74 billion a year ago), according to Crunchbase, a rare centicorn (or is it hectocorn), behind China’s ByteDance (owner of TikTok) and China's Ant Group as the most valuable private company on the planet. Tesla is now worth over $1 trillion, up from $34 billion three years ago. (That’s 23X!)
Tesla CEO Elon Musk gestures as he visits the construction site of Tesla's Gigafactory in Gruenheide near Berlin, Germany, August 13, 2021. Patrick Pleul/Pool via Reuters ·POOL New / reuters
“All I can say about the human being himself is in terms of all his moves — they have been either validated or haven’t been proven wrong,” says Philippe Houchois, Tesla analyst at Jefferies of Musk.
“Elon Musk was wrongly written off by a lot of the corporate community for his clownish behavior that was such a big distraction,” adds Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor of management at Yale University.
Those lofty valuations don’t begin to speak to the import and impact of Tesla and SpaceX. How do you value leading the entire world’s transportation industry away from fossil fuels and into the electric age? Or accelerating exploration and perhaps colonization of space while along the way perhaps providing reliable internet for the world?
Wealth
This one’s easy. Elon Musk, 50 years old, is the richest person in the world, now worth $276 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, $87 billion richer than No. 2 on the list, Jeff Bezos. Musk is richer than Bezos and his ex-wife MacKenzie Scott put together, richer than all the Walton family members put together. Statista estimates “the average U.S. resident would need to work 3 million years at the average annual wage of $69,392” to accrue Musk’s fortune. (Better get cracking!)
Note too, that Musk is the nation's most popular billionaire, according to Vox, with 50% surveyed saying they had a favorable opinion — equal Democrats and Republicans, btw — and “a staggering” 66% of men viewing him favorably.
When looking at the other top billionaires — Gates, Page, Arnault and Buffett — who would you bet has the most upside going forward? That speaks to this recent study on Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire. The methodology, which looks to be some sort of extrapolation, suggests that Musk will get there in 24 months. (We’ll check back.)
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Dietmar Woidke, Minister President of the State of Brandenburg, and Elon Musk, Tesla CEO, from left, attend the opening of the Tesla factory Berlin Brandenburg in Gruenheide, Germany, Tuesday, March 22, 2022. The first European factory in Gr'nheide, designed for 500,000 vehicles per year, is an important pillar of Tesla's future strategy. (Patrick Pleul/Pool via AP) ·ASSOCIATED PRESS
Agency
As I'm sure you saw this week, Musk revealed he bought a 9.2% stake in Twitter (making him the company’s largest shareholder) which sent the stock soaring and netting him over half a billion dollars. Musk, who will serve on the company’s board, at first said he was a passive investor, then changed it to active. (SEC rules are such a bother, right?)
Twitter (TWTR) is Musk’s means to communicate with his 80.7 million followers, (he got 4.4 million to vote "yes" or "no" on whether the platform should have an edit function). Musk uses Twitter to disintermediate the media, which makes sense because he has 10X the viewership of "60 Minutes" or 20X Wall Street Journal subscribers, though his position in Twitter may not be the boon the market seems to think.
Each morning at Yahoo Finance we have a newsroom meeting. Musk and his companies come up almost every single day, sometimes more than once (yesterday it was the Austin "cyber rodeo" grand opening). Same for newsrooms across the world too. No other person matches that.
Last December I went to NASDAQ headquarters in Times Square where Musk was named Time Magazine’s person of the year. (I actually ran into him in a hallway and exchanged pleasantries.) Musk’s fashion-model mother Maye was there (said hi to her as well), as well as Musk’s then 18-month-old son X, who was very well behaved and stole the show.
Musk talked about his vision for space: “The point of SpaceX is to help make humanity a spacefaring civilization and ultimately a multi-planet species so as to expand the scope and scale of consciousness and ultimately better understand what questions to ask about the answer which is the universe.” Whoa. Not small stuff there.
I was sitting a few tables away from Martha Stewart, who, looking almost star-struck, called out: “Hey Elon, when's the electric truck coming out?”
Oh yeah, that hasn’t even happened yet.
This article was featured in a Saturday edition of the Morning Brief on April 9, 2022. Get the Morning Brief sent directly to your inbox every Monday to Friday by 6:30 a.m. ET. Subscribe
By Andy Serwer, editor-in-chief of Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter: @serwer
