On July 24, Musk posted “(Former) Trillionaire” on X, a rare public acknowledgment from a man who rarely concedes ground. The post came as his fortune kept sliding. He’d first dropped below $1 trillion on July 1, and the losses continued from there. This week alone, SpaceX shares fell another 4.8% on Monday to around $109.50, extending a 50% plunge since the stock’s June 16 high and pushing Musk’s net worth below $700 billion for the first time since December.

Forbes put the figure at roughly $695.7 billion, down from the $1.45 trillion peak he hit six weeks earlier when SpaceX’s IPO briefly made him the world’s first trillionaire. All told, Musk has lost about $750 billion on paper, nearly the combined net worth of the next three richest men in the world, Larry Page (roughly $268.5 billion), Sergey Brin (roughly $270.6 billion), and Jeff Bezos (roughly $252.6 billion).

The post is also ironic given what Musk had just told The Economist. Days earlier, in a wide-ranging interview with editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes at Tesla’s Texas Gigafactory, Musk predicted that money “won’t matter” by 2036, arguing AI and robotics will eventually produce more goods and services than anyone could consume.

Days after video of the interview spread on his social media platform, Musk unveiled X Money, the payment feature he’s promised for years as part of X’s push to become an “everything app.” He posted “This is money” on X, and the service began rolling out to Premium and Premium+ subscribers on July 27, the same week his own fortune was cratering.

Money is all relative

X Money gives users a digital wallet built into X: a deposit account, peer-to-peer transfers with no fees, and a metal Visa debit card tied to their X handle. It’s the first version of a plan Musk first floated in a 2022 investor pitch deck, where he described X as eventually rivaling China’s WeChat. Visa signed on as X Money’s first partner in early 2025.

Musk has made similar comments in the past. Musk has been building toward this same argument for months. Just weeks ago, around the time of SpaceX’s IPO, he told XPRIZE founder Peter Diamandis that “money will stop being relevant at some point in the future,” arguing that once AI and robots produce more goods and services than the money supply can match, currency loses its purpose.

Diamandis pointed out the irony in the moment, as Musk had just become the world’s first trillionaire. Earlier this year, on saving for retirement, Musk said the practice will become pointless because AI-driven productivity will exceed “what people possibly could think of as abundance,” with a “universal ‘you can have whatever you want’ income” replacing the need to save at all. On the podcast People by WTF, he said money “disappears as a concept” once AI and robotics can meet human needs without wages functioning as a way to allocate labor.

The timing made the moment stranger. Days after the tweet, Musk unveiled X Money, the payment feature he’s promised for years as part of X’s push to become an “everything app.” He posted “This is money” on X, and the service began rolling out to Premium and Premium+ subscribers on July 27 — the same week his own fortune was cratering.

Fellow tech billionaire Vinod Khosla pushed back on the timeline in a Fortune piece, arguing the prediction holds only if politics allows that abundance to be shared, a reminder that even if AI eliminates scarcity, nothing guarantees the gains get distributed evenly.

IPO hype

Tesla shares fell 14.5% on July 23, the stock’s worst single day in over a year, after Q2 earnings showed record revenue but collapsing profit: adjusted earnings of $0.33 a share missed the $0.51-$0.54 Wall Street expected, and operating margin fell to 1.4% from 4.1% a year earlier. The gap came from price cuts used to drive volume and a 142% jump in capital spending on AI, robotaxis, and the Optimus robot. Several banks, including JPMorgan and Mizuho, cut their price targets afterward.

SpaceX’s decline is a different story. Shares are down close to 50% from their June peak, pressured by two delayed Starship test launches, a $60 billion all-stock acquisition of AI coding company Cursor that dilutes existing shares ahead of an August 6 lock-up expiration, and a valuation that leaves little room for error.

Starship’s 13th test flight succeeded on July 25, but the stock hit a new low anyway — SpaceX’s first earnings report as a public company, due August 4, is now seen as the next real test.