TradingKey - Elon Musk currently has a large stock ownership stake in many of the companies he has founded or is managing as a CEO, where he has invested heavily in both developing these companies into mature businesses and for the long term growth of his vision for technology and infrastructure.
Elon Musk's largest public (traded) stock ownership is in Tesla (TSLA), (as of December of 2025), where he was actually one of the initial investors in the company (back in early 2003). Since becoming one of the key first investors in the company's existing entities, he has been the sole source of all their funding for the last 20 years, and as he is the largest individual holder of Tesla Corporation shares since becoming the CEO of the business last year (2024) , he owns approximately 15.8% of Tesla's total equity stock, which translates into a gross market value worth tens of billions of dollars in 2025, and continues to climb through his stock-based compensation being awarded based upon the operating success of Tesla Corporation.
Tesla's stock and the brand of Tesla are very much associated with CEO Elon Musk. He has built his own brand around the belief in electric vehicles (EVs), renewable energy sources, his long-term view of the future of EVs as part of people's lives, as well as robotics and technology associated with EVs and the ability for them to drive themselves.
Although Tesla represents a significant portion of Musk’s economic interests, the majority of his wealth is derived substantially from the private equity investments he has made in companies that he has started or has co-founded. In terms of private equity, Musk’s most significant investments are in the following four companies, which together represent multi-billion dollar valuations: SpaceX (with an estimated market valuation in the hundreds of billions), which will soon be publicly traded (and is expected to go public in the next few years); xAI, which is developing next-generation artificial intelligence (AI); Neuralink, which is developing technology to connect the human brain with computers; and, The Boring Co. which develops infrastructure for new types of transportation.
All four of these companies are privately held, and they comprise a large percentage of Musk's net worth; they are representative of Musk's strategic focus in developing technologies that enable space exploration, artificial intelligence (AI), connectivity, and advanced infrastructure projects.
Elon Musk was one of the founders of X.com, which is now known as PayPal, and before eBay bought it, he owned quite a bit of stock in PayPal, the profits from which he would go on to fund many of his business ventures. He has stated in the past that apart from his investments in Tesla and SpaceX, he does not have very many publicly-traded shares in companies that do not directly relate to his business.
Elon Musk is very famous for his various personal investments in various cryptocurrencies (he has also invested money in the form of Bitcoin, Ethereum and Dogecoin) but he does not reveal how much of each of these cryptocurrencies he owns.
Elon Musk has a different investment philosophy than the average investor; average investors usually diversify their investment portfolios by making numerous public market investments. Whereas Elon Musk invests all of his disposable income into business enterprises in which he has a role and shares the decision-making continuously during the production process and the market introduction process. As such, he generally does not invest in publicly-traded stocks unless he was the initial founder of the company or believes the company has an extremely high probability of succeeding in the future.