Musk aimed to be the first trillionaire. He's lost half a trillion instead. Is a Tesla crash next?

Elon Musk’s entire fortune floats on the boldest fraud in human history.

Sure, there’s the Mississippi Bubble, the South Sea Bubble, the Enron collapse, and the Madoff Ponzi scheme. But none of those played out in broad daylight, on the internet. We have access to every piece of data required to expose this fraud before it mushroomed beyond comprehension. Yet, for reasons, we looked away.

Yes, Musk’s fortune is built on real taxpayer subsidies and a genuine first-mover advantage in industries that have kept him fed at the taxpayer’s teat. But as the personification of the AI bubble before the AI bubble even existed, Musk has always been worth exponentially more than his companies actually earn in a way that only makes sense if you’ve been on ayahuasca for nine months.

But look at how that trip groks in basic math: Tesla trades at roughly $1.43 trillion on $5.6 billion in annual profit, a company priced at 255 times its earnings, when Toyota, the world’s biggest car maker, trades at around nine times earnings. Nine. SpaceX lost $4.9 billion in 2025 and another $4.28 billion in this year’s first quarter alone, even as investors kept pricing it like the most valuable company on Earth.

That massive canyon between the story and the balance sheet is what looks like the fraud, and closing it has always required something bigger before sense and gravity took the wheel: more government favors, more advantages, more entanglements that make him too big to fail. It turned out that something was buying the presidency. That is why he spent $291 million putting Donald Trump in the White House, that we know of, plus the $44 billion he marshaled to turn Twitter into a GOP Super PAC.

DOGE, USAID Cuts, and the Human Toll

And then, as soon as he got the White House, Musk went “wild” the way Bobby Kennedy Jr. went “wild” on health, but with the entire government gutting the services it provides while costing taxpayers, especially when you consider the IRS cuts, far more than he could have ever saved them. His USAID cuts set in motion policies that a peer-reviewed Lancet study projects will cause up to 14 million deaths. Meanwhile, at home, his team facilitated the theft of Americans’ data and gutted the exact offices designed to keep us from getting explosive diarrhea.

When the success of the Tesla Takedown and the GOP’s humiliating loss in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race pushed him out of the government, he decided to get off TV and focus on what he does best: getting rich off what looks like fraud.

But that fraud, like the AI bubble itself, depends largely on the absence of a government to check it. And the regime had all investigations into his businesses tossed, freeing him up for the biggest grift of his life—the SpaceX launch, which made him rich beyond belief. We had to break open America’s strategic supply of zeros to talk about how rich he was, which is likely the whole point for a dude whose only reality comes from assessing himself compared to other billionaires.

Musk’s Fortune Is Sinking With Trump’s Approval Ratings

So it may not be a coincidence that as Trump sinks deeper into derangement and unpopularity, Musk’s fortune is sinking with him.

On July 17, Bloomberg reporter Steven T. Dennis posted two lines that undersold their own news: SpaceX is down roughly $1 trillion from its all-time high, and Musk has slid from the first trillion-dollar fortune in human history to something closer to $800 billion. (You can track Elon’s wealth and the effort to prevent trillionaires here.)

The convenient version says SpaceX got swept up in a general AI-stock panic. The real version sits in SpaceX’s own SEC filings, and it is narrower and worse: the rockets are fine, the satellites are fine, and the part of SpaceX that used to be Twitter is eating the balance sheet alive.

Inside SpaceX’s xAI Debt Crisis

In February 2026, Musk folded xAI, which had already absorbed the decimated corpse of X, which had lost as much as three-fourths of its value the year before, directly into SpaceX. SpaceX’s newly reported AI segment lost $6.36 billion in 2025 alone, more than the entire company’s net loss. Starlink and the actual rocket business are still profitable. But those real businesses justify normal price-to-earnings ratios. It’s the AI Musk bet that could make him a trillionaire, which it did until July 3. America’s 250th birthday was a clusterfuck for both Trump and his corporate sponsor.

Musk and the rest of the AI industry know the only thing holding this bubble up is a Trump administration that stays in power and stays unaccountable to voters. Put simply, Musk’s trillionaire status depends on Republicans winning this year’s midterms. Democrats taking either chamber means real oversight of DOGE and of Musk’s purchase of the presidency. That oversight could break SpaceX, drag down a Tesla built on hot air, and kill his plan to merge his two biggest companies into one unaccountable fortune.

X was never just Musk’s hobby or his personal campaign megaphone. It wasn’t supposed to make money. It’s supposed to shift gravity. And it did. Trump could never have won without Musk pushing Trump back to the center of social media and corporate America.

Now that tool is a disclosed, audited, SEC-registered anchor dragging down the most valuable rocket company on Earth. According to SpaceX’s own merger filing, xAI accounts for roughly 20 percent of the combined company’s valuation, a fifth of the “world’s first trillion-dollar fortune” riding on Grok and a social network that has reportedly been renting out its own computing power to competitors, including Anthropic, just to book revenue.

The debt tells the same story. In March 2026, SpaceX took out a $20 billion bridge loan and used it to pay off xAI’s existing debt, moving X’s liabilities directly onto SpaceX’s own balance sheet. The AI segment’s cumulative deficit has reached $41.3 billion. Long-term debt sits around $29 billion. Bond investors have noticed: the week after SpaceX sold $25 billion in new bonds this summer, the value of those bonds fell $305 million. Economist Dean Baker’s read: bondholders got less confident, not more, the week they were asked for money. Stock investors are still pricing SpaceX like the most profitable company in history is inevitable. Bond investors are betting on whether it pays its bills. Same company, same week, opposite conclusions.

Tesla’s 255-to-1 Problem

Which brings us back to Tesla and fraud as a service. Tesla made $94.8 billion in revenue in 2025, not $5 billion. Its profit was $5.6 billion, on a stock priced at roughly $1.43 trillion. Investors are paying about 255 times Tesla’s actual earnings for a car company whose overall revenue fell 2.9 percent last year. That is still an absurd multiple. It is a story about a company priced on a future that keeps failing to arrive, not a company with no revenue at all. Same disease as SpaceX: real, profitable businesses propping up a valuation built almost entirely on promises, made by the same man whose other company just proved those promises can cost you $6 billion a year when they do not pan out.

None of it makes sense to anyone but a cult of personality of traders and tryhards who’ve made money with Musk but really just want to be him. But we all know what has made this possible? A corporate system rigged by the Republicans for the last 60 years to reverse the New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement to create exactly the kind of environment that makes fraud like this—and a white nationalist capture of government—possible.

The Stakes of the 2026 Midterms

But there’s no more hiding Musk’s intentions. You have to insulate yourself from reality to ignore his cracked-out lies about SpaceX’s potential valuation that make even less sense than the dream of inhabiting Mars in his lifetime. Meanwhile, both Musk and the Trump regime are sprinting to criminalize any opposition to them as they attempt an ethnic cleansing of America.

This isn't just a political crisis; it's a corporate acquisition of the federal government—bought on margin, with American taxpayers forced to foot the bill.

In the first episode of the Trillionaire Kill Chain podcast, I explained how American fascism is, at its core, a campaign finance story.

The first time it became possible for one person to effectively buy the election, one man did. And he turned that into being a trillionaire. But what happens when the regime you’ve propped up is so unpopular that there may be no amount of money that could prop it up, right as the world figures out that the fortune you built rests on a house of toothpicks that’s finally being picked apart.

The stakes of 2026 aren’t just freedom versus fascism. It’s fraud versus facing the music.

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