Elon Musk‘s ongoing war of words with President Donald Trump has hit him where it hurts. No, not his ego—you can take a look at his Friday night spent retweeting fawning remarks from supporters to see that nothing’s changed, there. But the father of 14 (that we know about) took a major hit to his money hoard on Thursday, reportedly losing $34 billion of his personal fortune in a single day, marking the second-biggest personal wealth loss ever.
It’s an upsetting reminder that even though we’re all been chuckling over the he said/he said of it all—is Trump shading Musk’s admitted GLP-1 agonist use with that “Elon was ‘wearing thin’” slam? Didn’t everybody already know about Trump’s well-documented relationship with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein?—there’s a very real cost to the battle of the billionaires.
Just kidding! It’s not upsetting at all (unless you’re one of those sycophantic tweeters, I suppose). The adaptation of “The Scorpion and the Frog” we’ve been watching since Thursday (real life plot twist: the frog is also an asshole!) has erased a figure roughly equivalent to the GDP of Iceland from Musk’s personal holdings, Bloomberg reports. And that number might be even worse for Elon Musk, reports the outlet, as that $34 billion figure “doesn’t reflect any damage to the value of his private enterprises — an increasingly important source of his net worth.”
For example, the early Tesla investor is also the company’s CEO…and I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the company has been struggling lately. Stock for the publicly owned electric vehicle company was down 14.3% on Thursday, reports Salon, signaling a $150 billion loss in market value.
Then there are the contracts Musk’s SpaceX and other companies have with the federal government. “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it,” Trump noted on social media Thursday—even as news broke that the federal government was hustling to rehire workers fired by the chainsaw-wielding magnate-led DOGE.
Ending that relationship would be harder than Trump’s post might suggest, as, per The New York Times, NASA and the Pentagon are “intensely reliant” on SpaceX tech. But future contracts now seem less certain.
The entire situation is a world away from November 2024, when Musk’s multi-million-dollar investment in Trump’s campaign for president (“Without me, Trump would have lost the election,” Musk tweeted Thursday) seemed ready to pay off big. Musk was worth $464 billion on December 17, 2024, a notable bounce back from November 2021, when Musk suffered the world’s worst-ever personal wealth loss.
That’s right, Musk now occupies the #1 and #2 spots on the money loss leaderboard, with (as of Friday) his now-reduced fortune of $334.5 billion left to comfort him. He still has more money than anyone else on earth—but, still, that’s got to hurt. If only there were a way to ease that pain.
