Elon Musk’s Portfolio: 10 Biggest Investments

Published April 25, 2022 at 10:10 am EDT Updated September 7, 2026 at 2:08 pm EDT

In this article, we discuss 10 biggest investments in the Elon Musk portfolio.

Elon Musk is the richest man in the world with a personal net worth of over $270 billion. Musk owns a 17% stake in electric vehicle maker Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) worth more than $140 billion. He is also the owner of prominent startups like SpaceX, Neuralink and The Boring Company. SpaceX is valued at over $100 billion, Neuralink is worth $1 billion, and The Boring Company is worth more than $5 billion. Musk became the richest person in the world in early 2021 and has held the title since.

Apart from being the CEO of Tesla, Inc., Musk has also made huge investments in PayPal Holdings and Twitter, Inc. (NYSE:TWTR) over the years. Recently, he has been the subject of controversy after making a takeover bid for Twitter, Inc. that experts around the world have dismissed as “arrogant” and “nonsensical”. For example, Jim Cramer, a former hedge fund manager and host of Mad Money on CNBC, noted in a recent interview that the Twitter, Inc. board has “no choice but to reject” the offer made by Musk in light of their fiduciary responsibilities.

Early Life and Tesla Stardom

Musk was born in South Africa but moved to Canada for university education. From there, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, earning an undergraduate degree in physics and economics. He enrolled in a post-graduate program at Stanford University afterwards but deferred attendance in favor of his business activities. He launched Zip2, an online navigation service, before selling it and using the proceeds to fund another startup investment.

Musk became a big backer of Tesla, Inc. in 2004 through a private investment. Later, he joined the company as a board member and was promoted to the CEO position in 2008. In the years since, he has also launched other billion-dollar startups like SpaceX and Neuralink. As the share price of the EV maker has soared in recent months, so has the personal fortune of Musk. In November 2021, as the EV maker topped $1 trillion in market capitalization, the personal wealth of Musk was estimated to be at $340 billion at one point.

Career Trajectory: $28,000 to $270 billion

Musk dropped out of Stanford in 1995 and started Zip2 with $28,000 in borrowed money from his father. Merely four years later, he had sold this firm in a deal worth $307 million to computer firm Compaq. Musk earned close to $22 million from the sale. Flush from success, Musk invested $10 million from this money into a new venture named X.com. This was merged with Confinity and later became PayPal. In 2002, eBay purchased PayPal. Musk made more than $100 million from this sale

In the following years, Musk invested at least $180 million into different startups. This included a $100 million investment in SpaceX, a $70 million investment in Tesla, and a $10 million investment in SolarCity. These have paid Musk incredible dividends in the past few years and he has climbed to the top of the wealth ladder. Naturally, his incredible wealth has attracted a lot of interest on Wall Street where market experts are studying his investment patterns in hopes of figuring out the winning formula.

Our Methodology

The companies listed below were picked from a careful assessment of the investment history of Elon Musk.

Elon Musk's Portfolio: 10 Biggest Investments

Elon Musk’s Portfolio: Biggest Investments

10. OpenAI

OpenAI is a research laboratory that focuses on artificial intelligence (AI). The firm, considered a competitor to DeepMind, an AI initiative of Google parent Alphabet, is based in San Francisco. Musk was one of the earliest funders of the company, pledging $1 billion to it when it was founded in 2015 alongside Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever. In 2019, OpenAI received a $1 billion grant from tech giant Microsoft as well. Musk, who had served on the board of the firm since it was founded, resigned in 2018 but continues to play an advisory role at the firm.

Musk, while announcing his resignation, cited potential conflicts of interest as OpenAI and Tesla were both working on AI initiatives. Up until 2019, OpenAi had been a non-profit. After receiving the Microsoft funding, however, the firm turned the business model around and became a for-profit firm. It also announced the commercial licensing of the technologies it had developed. Elon Musk has publicly criticized the OpenAI deal with Microsoft, noting in a September 2020 tweet that OpenAI had been “captured” by Microsoft.

Just like PayPal Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:PYPL), Tesla, Inc., and Twitter, Inc., OpenAI is one of the firms on the radar of elite growth investors.

9. Dogecoin

Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency that started as a joke but has since gained mainstream recognition as celebrities like Elon Musk back it on social media. Musk has personally confirmed that he does own Dogecoin. In recent tweets, posted in context of Musk making a bid to take over social networking platform Twitter, the billionaire has teased the concept of introducing Dogecoin payments on Twitter as well. In January this year, Musk had revealed that Tesla merchandise was buyable via the meme coin as well.

Dogecoin has jumped in tandem with a series of tweets from Musk in the past few months. In July 2021, Musk tweeted about the problems associated with coins like Bitcoin and Ethereum and speculated that an update from Dogecoin that aimed to solve these issues, like lowering transaction times and costs, would give the currency an edge over other coins. Back in April 2021, a meme on Dogecoin had resulted in a huge surge in the price of the coin. During an appearance on popular show Saturday Night Live, Musk called the coin a “hustle”.

8. Bitcoin

Apart from Dogecoin, Musk has also admitted multiple times that he owns some Bitcoin, the most popular cryptocurrency in the world. Tesla, Inc., the EV maker led by Musk, owns more than 43,000 Bitcoin, worth close to $2 billion. This is one of the largest institutional holdings of the coin in the United States. Despite a broad drop in the prices of the coin towards the backend of last year, Musk did not sell any of his stake in Bitcoin, per regulatory filings submitted by the EV maker to authorities in the US.

Speaking at The B Word conference in the summer of last year, Musk said he was committed to investing in cryptocurrencies in general but highlighted certain risks associated with owning Bitcoin. He stressed that the coin used the proof of work as a consensus mechanism that was “using energy that’s a bit too much and not necessarily good for the environment”. He clarified some of the controversy caused by his statements on the coin that caused the price to plummet, highlighting that he would “pump but not dump” the coin and wanted to see it succeed.

7. SolarCity

Musk agreed to purchase solar energy firm SolarCity in an all-stock deal worth $2.6 billion in 2016. Musk convinced the board of Tesla, Inc. that the purchase was part of a larger plan to create vertical integration within Tesla that would help with energy generation and consumption. The deal has come under increased scrutiny in the past few years and Tesla, Inc. shareholders and Musk are engaged in a court battle over it that could result in settlements worth $13 billion. Musk owned nearly 22% of Tesla and 21% of SolarCity when the deal was finalized.

Musk has denied any wrongdoing with regards to the SolarCity deal while Tesla, Inc. shareholders allege that the deal benefited Musk and his close family and associated unfairly. Tesla shares have skyrocketed since the deal. At the time, the share price of the EV maker stood at $43.92. It has now climbed above $1,000 per share, up 1,500% in the past five years. SolarCity was founded by Lyndon and Peter Rive, both of whom are cousins of Musk. Musk served as the chairman of the board of the company at the time of the acquisition.

6. The Boring Company

The Boring Company is a firm that aims to provide a solution to traffic woes by building a network of underground tunnels. The company is headquartered in Pflugerville. It recently announced that it had raised over $675 million at a Series C funding round that values the company at more than $5.5 billion. Musk tweeted about it on April 21, noting that the firm was looking to hire “amazing people” and scale up boring machine production. He added that the firm wanted to build “thousands of miles of tunnels”.

The Boring Company, founded by Musk, has also recently announced that it had won approval for building a 29-mile tunnel network connecting 51 stations under Las Vegas. The network will be capable of transporting 57,000 passengers per hour and has been labeled the “largest subsurface transportation project” ever by the firm. The Boring Company aims to transport passengers at speeds of up to 150 miles an hour. So far, the company has only been able to reach speeds of around 50 miles per hour.

In addition to PayPal Holdings, Inc., Tesla, Inc., and Twitter, Inc., The Boring Company is one of the firms that hedge funds are monitoring as a potential growth investment.

5. Neuralink

Neuralink is a neurotechnology company founded by Elon Musk in 2016. The firm aims to develop implantable brain–machine interfaces. In July 2019, a profile of the firm was published in The New York Times which claimed that Musk had invested nearly $100 million into the firm. In July 2021, the company announced that it had raised over $200 million at a Series C funding round that valued the company at close to $1 billion. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, also participated in the funding round.

Musk has claimed that the devices developed by Neuralink will one day not only help wirelessly transmit brain signals, but also be helpful in fighting neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s, dementia and spinal cord injuries. In April, as Neuralink released a video showing a monkey playing a computer game using a Neuralink device, Musk tweeted that the first product launched by the firm would help paralyzed people play with their smartphones faster than people using thumbs to operate them.

4. SpaceX

SpaceX was founded by Elon Musk in 2002 with a mission to revolutionize space technology and take humankind to Mars. The company has achieved a slew of milestones in this regard already. In 2006, the company was awarded the first NASA contract. In 2008, it launched the Falcon-I, the first liquid-propellant rocket made by a private firm to reach orbit. In 2010, the Dragon spacecraft of the company touched down on the International Space Station. The firm was last year awarded a $3 billion NASA contract.

As the reusable rockets developed by SpaceX become more popular, investors have started to pay serious attention to the company. In October of 2021, the firm announced that it had agreed to sell $755 million in stock from insiders at $560 a share, valuing SpaceX at more than $100 billion. Merely a few months prior, in February 2021, the company had fetched a $74 billion valuation at a $419 per share price. It has raised over $1.2 billion at a funding round then. Musk has so far not revealed when he plans to make the firm public.

3. Twitter, Inc. (NYSE:TWTR)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 83

Latest securities filings reveal that Elon Musk has spent more than $2.6 billion on Twitter, Inc. since the end of January, building up a stake in the firm that represents over 9% of the firm. A few days after this filing, Musk offered to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share, valuing the firm at close to $43 billion. In a letter sent to Twitter Chairman Bret Taylor, and also part of the filing, Musk said that “free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy” and Twitter had the potential to be the “the platform for free speech around the globe”.

Musk’s offer represents a 54% premium on the share price of Twitter, Inc. a day before Musk began investing in the company. Musk owns around 73,115,038 Twitter shares that are valued at more than $3.7 billion.

At the end of the fourth quarter of 2021, 83 hedge funds in the database of Insider Monkey held stakes worth $3.1 billion in Twitter, Inc., compared to 94 in the preceding quarter worth $6.3 billion.

ClearBridge Investments, in its Q4 2021 investor letter, mentioned Twitter, Inc.. Here is what the fund has to say in its letter:

“Weakness among our holdings in the communication services sector was the other detractor to performance. Twitter, Inc. shares sold off following weaker than expected third-quarter results, but under new leadership, we see the potential for improved execution and performance as live events and entertainment return to pre-pandemic levels.”

2. Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 90

Tesla, Inc. is one of the fastest growing companies in the world. Musk was not a founding member of the firm but one of the earliest financiers who invested in it as early as 2004. Musk went from being a board member of the company to the CEO in 2008. Tesla went public two years later at an initial price of $17 per share. As of April 24, the shares have climbed over $1,000. Apart from making and selling electric cars, the company has also revealed plans to produce electric trucks.

Musk is the largest Tesla, Inc. shareholder. This is the primary source of the Musk fortune, who is the richest man in the world. At the end of 2021, Musk owned 177 million shares of Tesla worth almost $142 billion.

At the end of the fourth quarter of 2021, 91 hedge funds in the database of Insider Monkey held stakes worth $12.9 billion in Tesla, Inc., compared to 60 in the previous quarter worth $10.6 billion.

Here is what ClearBridge Investments had to say about Tesla, Inc. in its Q4 2021 investor letter:

“Within the growth universe we target, emerging growth stocks – the category with the highest revenue growth rates – significantly underperformed the overall growth categories in 2021 after leading performance in 2020. The pull-through effect on digitization, online access across industries, and spending to modernize outdated corporate infrastructures accelerated trends in a highly compressed time frame. Much of that trend slackened in 2021 and shares of these companies, while showing good top-line growth, saw slowing appreciation from the blistering pace in the prior year. With that moderating growth, multiples decelerated from 2020 highs. Bucking the headwinds among our emerging growth names was Tesla, Inc. which saw continued sales momentum from their leadership positions in the key growth areas of electric vehicles.”

1. PayPal Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:PYPL)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 110

PayPal Holdings, Inc. is a digital payments firm. Musk was one of the co-founding members of the firm. In 1999, Musk co-founded X.com that later merged with Confinity and was renamed PayPal in 2001. In 2002, ecommerce firm eBay purchased PayPal for $1.5 billion. The company now has a market capitalization of around $100 billion. At the time of the deal, Musk was the largest shareholder with ownership of 7,109,989 shares, worth more than 11% of the firm.

Musk is no longer associated with PayPal Holdings, Inc.. He used the proceeds from the PayPal buyout to fund ventures in Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity.

At the end of the fourth quarter of 2021, 110 hedge funds in the database of Insider Monkey held stakes worth $9.9 billion in PayPal Holdings, Inc., compared to 123 in the preceding quarter worth $12.8 billion.

In its Q4 2021 investor letter, Polen Capital Management, an asset management firm, highlighted a few stocks and PayPal Holdings, Inc. was one of them. Here is what the fund said:

“For the full year 2020, one of the top performers was PayPal Holdings, Inc., which we purchased in 2019, the company continues to take market share in digital payments and has seen an acceleration in user adoption and engagement, especially within their “silver tech” or older user demographic. We expect many more years of ongoing double-digit growth from their various business segments and new initiatives.”

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