I have heard the phrase “trillion dollars” more in the past couple of weeks than maybe ever before — so much so that it can be tempting to even shrug off as insignificant, but a trillion is anything but. This Wall Street journal video did a great job explaining the scale of one trillion dollars. One way to look at it: $1 billion is 1,000 times larger than $1 million, and $1 trillion is 1,000 times larger than $1 billion, which means $1 trillion is 1 million times larger than $1 million! This raises the question of what other $1 trillion milestones are out there.
Elon Musk Net Worth
This is why $1 trillion keeps coming up more lately than ever before. SpaceX’s recent $1.77 trillion IPO (now up to a market cap of $2.71 trillion at the time of this writing following the Cursor deal) has propelled Musk to become the world’s first trillionaire (in US dollars, to be clear) — an unfathomable statement if you really think about what a trillion dollars is. Musk owns 64% of SpaceX class B supermajority voting right shares, 10% of SpaceX class A shares, and 26% of Tesla common stock according to FactSet. There are only 21 countries in the world with a GDP higher than $1 trillion.
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$1 Trillion ETF
Earlier this month, we also got the world’s first trillion-dollar ETF. The Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (VOO) passed $1 trillion in assets in the ETF share class (Vanguard has an ETF share class for its mutual funds). The total fund including mutual fund share classes is north of $1.7 trillion, but it is not even the largest mutual fund/share class/strategy out there. Vanguard Total Market fund (VTI is the ETF version) is more than $2.3 trillion! A truly staggering number and one of the recipients of the $1.8 trillion in inflows into the ETF space over just the past year.
The Latest Trillion Dollar Club
It wasn’t long ago when unicorns were hard to come by (“unicorns are private equity/venture capital-backed private companies with a $1 billion valuation). Now firms like SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, and others are commanding trillion-dollar private valuations. Setting these private companies aside and using the stock market as the arbiter of valuation, there are now 16 companies around the world with current valuations above $1 trillion. SpaceX, Micron, and SK Hynix are the latest names to join. Blue chips like Walmart, AMD, and JPMorgan are knocking on the door, just below the trillion-dollar level. It is worth noting that despite Walmart being the 17th largest public company globally, the largest – Nvidia – is 5x larger by market cap.
Source: Carson Investment Research, Morningstar 6/16/26
The takeaway here should of course be that $1 trillion is an absolutely staggering amount of money. There is also a lesson for long-term investing in stocks. We’ve written about it many times before, but these hyperbolic extremes remind us again that the best way to ‘fight back’ against inflation (and frankly the wealth gap) is to take the risk and reap the rewards of investing in the stock market.
For more content by Grant Engelbart, VP, Investment Strategy and Research, click here.
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