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Elon Musk no longer a trillionaire as AI bubble pops and SpaceX crashes

πŸ“° The Canary πŸ• June 24, 2026 at 8:27 AM
Elon Musk looking at SpaceX stock in freefall

On Friday 12 June, Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire. He achieved this on the back of his company SpaceX going public, despite said company not being profitable. This has inevitably led to the following:

Oh, and thanks to all this, the wretched Musk has already lost his β€˜trillionaire’ status:

Hey Elon Musk: money isn’t real

In a piece detailing how Musk blagged his way to becoming a trillionaire, we noted that SpaceX is actually three different companies taped together. And of those three companies:

  • SpaceXΒ isΒ notΒ profitable.
  • StarLinkΒ isΒ profitable.
  • Grok AIΒ isΒ reallyΒ notΒ profitable.

We added:

so SpaceX is not what you’d call a profitable company. In fact,Β it made a $4.9 billionΒ lossΒ last year. But despite this, when it went public,Β it achieved a valuation of $2 trillion.

Elon Musk managed to convince investors that SpaceX was worth trillions because:

  • Generative AI models like Grok will one day become all-knowing super intelligences (they won’t).
  • SpaceX is going to build data centres in space.

Following the scrutiny which arose after SpaceX went public, investors have now started to question SpaceX’s value. And as they say, what goes up must come down:

What’s happening with SpaceX isn’t confined to SpaceX. We’ve been living in an AI bubble for sometime now, and the signs are that the bubble is popping:

Why is it popping now?

It’s popping because AI companies recently tried charging what the tech actually costs. Up until now, they’d been subsidising the cost with billions of dollars of investor money. Once they stopped doing that, their customers panicked, because:

Oh, and it doesn’t stop there.

Once these companies realised how expensive the tech is, they started asking β€˜but it’s giving us a good return on investment, right?β€˜

The answer is it’s actually very difficult to show any return on investment for most companies. So the tech isn’t just expensive; it’s also potentially useless for any business which is driven by the profit motive – i.e. every company in the Fortune 500.

Cisco-fication

We’ve seen what’s happening with SpaceX before; specifically with Cisco and the Dot Com Bubble. Cisco builds the hardware that the internet relies on and that made it seem super valuable in the Dot Com era, but as Slashdot reported in 2025:

Cisco’s stock price touched $80.25 on Wednesday, finally eclipsing its dotcom-era peak of $80.06 set on March 27, 2000 β€” when the networking giant briefly surpassed Microsoft to become the world’s most valuable company. The journey back took 25 years, eight months and 13 days. The company’s fundamentals improved dramatically over that period, of course. Revenues have nearly quintupled since 1999, profits have quadrupled, earnings per share have grown eightfold, and margins have remained healthy throughout. Investors who bought at the peak still lost money to inflation for a generation.

If you’re a SpaceX investor and you get lucky, then 25 years from now your stock may be worth slightly more than what you just paid for it (not adjusted for inflation).

If you’reΒ unlucky, you just bought into the latest fantasy of an addled, Nazi-boosting Epstein associate.

Oh, and f*ck you for doing that!

Featured image via the Canary

By Willem Moore

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