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With a fortune of $363 billion, Elon Musk is worth more than anyone in history. Here are the employees, investors and disciples (but not ex-wives) who have gotten rich alongside him.
Antonio Gracias, a lawyer who became a private equity investor, had no government experience until February when Elon Musk, acting as head of the Department of Government Efficiency under President Trump, tapped him to rummage around the Social Security Administration in search of fraud. Soon Gracias was parroting Musk and Trump’s claims (unsupported by evidence) that Democrats were actively working to “import voters” by issuing social security numbers to immigrants.
Gracias, whose parents immigrated to the U.S. from Spain, is worth $2.2 billion, thanks almost entirely to Musk. His investment firm bet early on SpaceX, Tesla, SolarCity, and other Musk ventures. He sits on Tesla’s board, has a personal stake in Tesla worth $300 million, and is one of Musk’s closest friends, even having traveled with him on vacation. So it’s not surprising, he’s a “yes, Elon” kind of friend. “Elon is right,” he said recently at a Wisconsin event where Musk had just made the claim that Biden ran “a massive large scale program to import as many illegals as possible, ultimately to change the entire voting map of the United States and disenfranchise the American people.” Now the investor has reportedly moved on from social security to leading a Musk-DOGE effort to overhaul infrastructure at the Department of Homeland Security.
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Chef, Drone Artist, ‘Consigliere’: How Kimbal Musk Rode His Brother’s Rocket Ship To Wealth
Going where Elon goes – in politics, and in business – has been Kimbal’s modus operandi for decades. And it’s made him very rich. View article
Elon Musk owes his staggering fortune to technological innovations and corporate machinations, but he couldn’t have done it by himself: Gracias backed him long before many others. But he’s not the only one who has stood by him over the years and, in turn, have gotten very rich or much richer riding his rocket ship. His brother never left his side, his early employees worked around the clock and his investors have backed him time and again. Musk has paid many of them back with fortunes in the hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars.
Call it the Musktocracy: investors, engineers, and hangers-on who amassed wealth and power through Musk, and who now buttress Musk’s increasingly radical worldview on X, carry out Musk business and political agenda, or simply look the other way as Musk creates controversies. Some cash out and go dark. Others are outspoken in their seemingly unconditional backing of Musk.
Folks like SpaceX’s president, Gwynne Shotwell, and Musk’s younger brother, Kimbal, owe their entire fortune to Elon. “I am thankful for my bro every day,” Kimbal posted on X in January. Others like venture capitalist and now informal Trump advisor Marc Andreessen were already rich, and then Elon made them much richer. “He is the most brilliant guy, the most brilliant engineer on the planet,” gushes Ron Baron, the 81-year-old mutual fund billionaire who embraced Musk in 2014. Between his investment firm and his personal bets, Baron has snapped up 4.5 million Tesla shares at an average cost of $12 each—a cool 20x return. He is still a bull and has vowed not to sell his personal shares for now, despite the fact that Tesla’s stock is down 43% since President Trump’s inauguration. “A lot of people disagree with me and say that Musk’s reputation is irreparably damaged, but I think everything passes,” Baron says. “When all this blows away, people will still buy his product more than anyone else’s.”
Two people Elon didn’t make rich: his ex-wives. His first wife, the Canadian novelist Justine Wilson Musk, whom he divorced in 2010 and with whom he has five children, received no shares in Tesla or SpaceX as she’d asked for, and is now worth just $15 million, or about 1/24,000th of Elon. His second ex-wife, actress Talulah Riley—to whom he was married twice, from 2010 to 2012, then again from 2013 to 2016—received a similar cash sum.
To see who has benefited the most from Musk (so far), Forbes pored through Tesla’s SEC documents, interviewed early SpaceX employees and spoke with investors in Musk’s companies. Here are 10 who can credit all the zeroes in their bank accounts to Musk, and another half-dozen whose fortunes got big bumps.
People Musk Made Rich
A select few who hitched their wagon to Musk at the right time have made nine-(and even ten-) figure fortunes.
Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg
Antonio Gracias
Net worth: $2.2 bil
A law school classmate of Musk’s PayPal colleague David Sacks, Gracias first met Musk around 2000. His Chicago-based Valor Equity Partners invested early in Tesla (2005), SpaceX (2008) and future Tesla acquisition SolarCity (2012). He loaned Musk $1 million when Tesla was struggling in 2008 and served on the carmaker’s board from 2007 to 2020. The two men are close friends who have taken family vacations together. Gracias manages a portion of Musk’s personal fortune.
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JB Straubel
Net worth: $1.6 bil
The Stanford-educated engineer was working on battery-powered planes in 2003 when he met Musk at a campus lecture. He played a critical role in Tesla’s early years, joining the fledgling EV company as employee No. 5 and driving the development of its battery packs and electric motors as chief technology officer. He’s the only original executive team member, aside from Musk, still connected to Tesla: Though he left the C-suite in 2019 to run Redwood Materials, an EV battery recycling firm he founded—and has cashed out $1 billion of Tesla stock after-tax over a dozen years—he joined Tesla’s board in 2023.
Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
Gwynne Shotwell
Net worth: $1.2 bil
With Musk splitting his attention between six companies and his DOGE duties, someone has to mind the rockets. That person is longtime SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell, who joined in 2002 as SpaceX’s 11th employee after working for a smaller rocket company. She met Musk while visiting a former colleague at his SpaceX office. Elon was so impressed that he told her to apply for the new position of VP of sales. “I dithered for about a month” before finally taking the job, she once told a group of Stanford students. Now the firm’s worth so much that even her estimated 0.3% stake is worth ten digits.
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Kimbal Musk
Net worth: $900 mil
In 1995, he helped launch his brother’s first startup, the online city guide Zip2, and four years later PayPal precursor . He was on SpaceX’s board until 2022. He has netted $170 million from Tesla stock sales, including $16 million in February following Trump’s inauguration, but he still holds shares and options worth $400 million and a board seat. Kimbal, a trained chef who nearly always wears a cowboy hat, cofounded and runs The Kitchen, a group of four restaurants including one in Boulder, Colorado, where he lives. He also founded Nova Sky Stories, a drone light show startup whose clients include—you guessed it—Tesla.
Ira Ehrenpreis
Net worth: $550 mil
The VC first backed Tesla in 2006, when it had just 50 employees and hadn’t yet started producing cars. A Tesla board member since 2007 and chair of its compensation committee, he has faced scrutiny for rubber-stamping Musk’s 2018 $55.8 billion pay package, which was struck down by a Delaware judge, approved by a shareholder vote, then struck down again. He netted $100 million from unloading Tesla shares in 2021. He rejects Forbes’ estimates but won’t provide documentation.
Brendon Thorne/Bloomberg
Robyn Denholm
Net worth: $500 mil
The veteran of Toyota, Sun Microsystems and Juniper Networks joined Tesla’s board in 2014, replacing Musk as chair in 2018 as part of Elon’s settlement with the SEC for falsely tweeting that he’d secured funding to take Tesla private. She has pocketed $100 million selling shares since February 2024 but might be on the hook—together with Musk and other board members—to reimburse the company more than $900 million under a settlement related to an excess-compensation suit. Back home, the Australia native owns stakes in the Sydney Kings and Sydney Flames basketball teams.
Thomas Mueller
Net worth: $500 mil
Raised in rural Idaho, Mueller joined SpaceX in 2002 as employee No. 1. At the time, Mueller, who has a master’s degree in mechanical engineering, was building home-brew rockets in a warehouse, and Musk had just sold PayPal to eBay. The pair sketched out the plans for what would be SpaceX’s first rocket, the Falcon 1, at a Super Bowl party. As head of propulsion engineering, Mueller led design and development of the engines for SpaceX’s Falcon launch vehicle and Dragon spacecraft. He left in 2020 to found Impulse Space, which is building orbital transfer vehicles, though still holds an estimated $200 million stake in SpaceX.
Zach Kirkhorn
Net worth: $440 mil
After a stint at McKinsey, the Harvard MBA joined Tesla in 2010 as a financial analyst. By 2019, Kirkhorn, then 34, was CFO. Musk handed him the title Master of Coin after the carmaker bought Bitcoin worth $1.5 billion in 2021. Two years later, he stepped down, cashed out $300 million from his stake and dropped $20 million on a 8,000-square-foot home in the Bay Area.
Jerome Guillen
Net worth: $250 mil
The mechanical engineering Ph.D. joined Tesla in 2010 and oversaw development of the Model S, Musk’s second vehicle, after the Roadster. Promoted to president of automotive in 2018, Guillen pocketed $160 million from stock sales after leaving Tesla in 2021, leaving over $400 million of unvested options on the table. He stays busy running a keto diet app and has cofounded a Bitcoin payments firm.
Kathleen Wilson-Thompson
Net worth: $230 mil
The former Walgreens HR exec has Musk’s recklessness to thank for her fortune: She joined Tesla’s board in 2018 as an independent director as part of Musk’s “I’m taking Tesla private” SEC settlement. Since 2020, she has pocketed $100 million from selling shares she got as compensation, and she holds another $120 million of stock and options.
People Musk Made Richer
These billionaires were already loaded when they wagered on Musk, but Elon propelled their fortunes to new heights.
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Larry Ellison
Net Worth: $162 bil
The Oracle cofounder invested $1 billion in Tesla in 2018 when he joined the board; his stake jumped to $4.7 billion by the time he stepped down in 2022. He also put $1 billion into X (né Twitter) in 2022 after Musk pitched him via text message.
Nordin Catic/Getty Images
Peter Thiel
Net Worth: $17.2 bil
Thiel met Musk in 2000 when Elon’s payments startup merged with Peter’s Confinity to form PayPal. Thiel cofounded VC firm Founders Fund, which invested early in SpaceX (2008) and remains the third-biggest shareholder, behind Musk and Google. Its estimated 6% stake is worth $20 billion.
Desiree Navarro/Getty Images
Net Worth: $7.5 bil
Once Tesla’s third-largest individual shareholder and a self-described Elon fanboy, the IT services billionaire has soured on his former idol, calling him a “tyrant CEO” and declaring in November that he’s “no longer all-in-Tesla.”
Courtesy Ron Baron
Net Worth: $6.4 bil
Baron has 40% of his flagship mutual fund tied up in Tesla. The octogenarian moneyman first invested in the EV maker about a decade ago. It’s up nearly 2,200% since. His funds also have stakes in SpaceX and xAI. Largely thanks to Elon, Baron’s personal fortune has more than tripled since 2016.
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Marc Andreessen
Net Worth: $1.9 bil
The former Democrat is now supporting Trump and Musk, even helping recruit tech talent for DOGE. His VC firm, Andreessen Horowitz, backed SpaceX in 2023 and co-led xAI’s $6 billion funding round in May 2024; both companies’ valuations have doubled since his firm invested.
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Jared Isaacman
Net Worth: $1.3 bil
The billionaire who flies fighter jets for fun has also taken rides on two SpaceX rockets, the first in 2021, the same year his Shift4 payments company invested $28 million into SpaceX. That stake is now worth $66 million, and Isaacman, Trump’s nominee to head NASA, also has a personal stake in the rocket maker.
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