A sharp selloff in SPCX shares on Monday led to an eye-catching statistic: Elon Musk's paper wealth fell by an estimated $150 billion in a single day, a figure that economist Peter Schiff not
A sharp selloff in SPCX shares on Monday led to an eye-catching statistic: Elon Musk's paper wealth fell by an estimated $150 billion in a single day, a figure that economist Peter Schiff noted exceeds the entire net worth of legendary investor Warren Buffett.
In a post on X, Schiff noted that SPCX fell 16.5% during the session. Applied to Musk's stake in the company, that decline translated to an estimated $150 billion paper loss for the day alone, a figure large enough on its own to exceed Buffett's total net worth.
Schiff was quick to frame the loss in context. Despite the scale of the one-day decline, he pointed out that Musk remains the world's only trillionaire, adding dryly that there was no need to feel sorry for him.
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“However, he's still the world's only trillionaire, so don't feel sorry for him,” he wrote in the post.
The SPCX selloff also has a crypto angle worth noting. When SpaceX listed on Nasdaq at $135 per share on June 12, the largest IPO on record, the tokenized version of its stock drew over $1 billion in investor demand across crypto platforms.
Bybit, Bitget Wallet, and Binance Wallet had all offered subscriptions to SPCXx, a tokenized SpaceX product issued through xStocks, a protocol that wraps real equities into blockchain tokens.
The demand far exceeded supply, and all three platforms canceled their campaigns on listing day, issuing refunds. For crypto-native investors watching Monday's 16.5% decline, the volatility is a reminder of the asset they tried, and largely failed, to access at IPO.
This is not the first time Schiff has used Musk's fortune to make a broader point about how modern wealth is measured. Following SpaceX's IPO earlier this month, Schiff noted in a post that Musk had become the first person to surpass John D. Rockefeller as the richest private citizen in history.
But he was quick to add a caveat. Adjusted for more than a century of inflation, Schiff said Rockefeller's real income amounted to roughly $2 billion a year, earned, not merely held on paper. Musk, by contrast, draws no salary from his companies.
“Rockefeller earned about $2 billion per year in real income. Musk earns nothing. What a difference a bubble makes,” Schiff shared in the X post.
Taken together, Schiff's remarks underscore his broader argument that the massive swings in Musk's net worth are largely a reflection of market valuations and investor sentiment, rather than actual income or cash in hand.
The SPCX decline, in his framing, illustrates exactly how quickly paper wealth tied to a single company's valuation can swing by triple-digit billions in a single session, gains or losses that Rockefeller's era of compounding annual income never had to contend with.
Whether SPCX shares recover in the sessions ahead remains to be seen. For now, Schiff's commentary continues to draw a sharp distinction between wealth that fluctuates with market mood and wealth that was actually earned.
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