ELON MUSK, the world’s first dollar trillionaire, set another record this week when he became the biggest ever loser of personal wealth on record.
Musk’s wealth fell by $350 billion in less than just over a week following the collapse of the share price in his Space X company.
Space X, Musk’s rocket, satellite and AI company, was floated on the stock market at a valuation of $1.78 trillion amidst a frenzy of speculators jumping on the Artificial Intelligence (AI) bandwagon and Musk’s pledge to build super artificial data centres in space.
By building data centres in space Musk was holding out the promise of freedom from irksome locals in countries objecting to having their communities plundered by these mega centres that consume vast quantities of energy and use up millions of gallons of water to cool them down.
Driven by the ‘fear of losing out’ syndrome that drives Wall Street investors, along with the rest of the world’s stock markets, they dutifully piled in to buy Space X stocks with its share price surging to a record breaking initial public offering that valued it at over $1.8 trillion and reached a peak of $2.9 trillion.
As the sole owner of Space X, Musk’s personal fortune was estimated to have reached $1.44 trillion last week. However, the bubble in Space X shares quickly turned into a rout falling by around 30% as technology shares suffered a widespread sell-off.
On Tuesday, it was revealed that Space X had lost $1 trillion wiping $500 billion (£379 billion) off Musk’s personal fortune.
The madness of the capitalist financial markets is illustrated by the fact that despite warnings from economists that Space X made a $4.9 billion loss last year, they still piled in using money borrowed from pension funds and other public bodies across the world in their desperation not to be left out of a profits bonanza.
These financial ‘geniuses’ bought into Musk’s myth of building massive data centres in space, ignoring the basic scientific fact that the vacuum in space makes cooling them practically impossible.
Space X was not alone amongst the giant US tech companies from having their overwhelmingly inflated stock prices crashing this week.
Shares in Musk’s Tesla fell by 5.8% wiping over $89 billion from its value while the computer chip giant Nvidia’s shares fell by 4.1%.
Driving this latest crisis, is the growing realisation amongst companies that have bought into the propaganda from the AI industry that this new, cheap, technology will do away with the need to employ workers and that the AI dream is just an illusion.
Far from being a cheap alternative to workers, AI is proving to be massively expensive with reports that one firm spent $500 million in a single month on Anthropic’s Claude AI, while Uber reported that it had spent its entire yearly budget for AI in the first three months of 2026.
Last August, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published research showing that 95% of organisations that invested in AI were getting zero returns for this investment.
The entire US capitalist system has been banking on AI sustaining the soaring stock market while the American economy is sinking under a massive national debt of nearly $40 trillion and crippled by raging inflation.
In the UK, the Labour government has also been claiming that the future for British capitalism is in the hands of AI and the US tech giants whose profits exist as promises in some distant future.
As the AI boom turn to bust, the capitalist class will be determined to inflict the resultant economic collapse into recession on the backs of the international working class.
The powerful working class will never accept being driven into destitution by a bankrupt capitalist system that has reached the end of the road.
The working class must resolve this crisis by demanding the trade unions act by calling general strikes to bring down their capitalist government and go forward to workers governments and socialism.
Smashing capitalism with socialist revolutions is the only way forward.