Elon Musk owns 48.4% of SpaceX (SPCX) on paper. What he owns outright today is closer to 36%, or roughly $708 billion.

Friday’s headlines put the stakes at over $900 billion. Musk replied that the number was wrong. He was right. Read the filing line by line, and the shares he holds outright come to 4.77 billion. The two figures are $245 billion apart.

The Filing Has Four Line Items. Only Two Are His

Musk filed a Schedule 13G on Thursday. That is the form the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requires from anyone holding more than 5% of a public company. It reports 6,418,547,515 shares, and it splits them four ways.

• Two of the four are stock he holds now.
• Trusts he controls hold 849,494,440 Class A shares and 3,916,980,790 Class B shares.

Together, that is 4,766,475,230 shares.

The other two are promises. There are 1,302,072,285 restricted shares that have not vested. There are another 350,000,000 shares he can buy through options but has not bought.

SEC rules make him count all of it. Anything a filer can vote, or can acquire within 60 days, goes into the total. So 48.4% of SpaceX is a correct legal answer. It is not an answer to what he owns.

The math shifts once you separate them. SpaceX had 13,181,779,945 shares outstanding on July 28. Musk’s 4.77 billion is 36.2% of that.

At Monday’s price of $147.81, up 6%, it is worth about $708 billion rather than $953 billion.

1.3 Billion Shares Need Mars. SpaceX Values Them at Zero

Musk said as much himself, hours after the filing landed.

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The IPO prospectus spells out what he means. The board granted him 1 billion restricted shares in January. They vest in 15 tranches.

Each tranche needs a market capitalization target that rises from $500 billion to $7.5 trillion. Each tranche also requires SpaceX to build a permanent human colony on Mars that can hold at least one million people. Both conditions, every time.

A second award covers 302,072,285 shares, carried over from the xAI merger and reissued in March. It runs across 12 tranches, from $1.065 trillion to $6.565 trillion. It also requires data centers off Earth delivering 100 terawatts of computing power a year.

Here is the part nobody reported. SpaceX judged both sets of milestones improbable as of March 31 and has recorded no compensation expense for either.

The company assigns these shares a cost of zero because it does not expect to pay them. Traders agree.

On Kalshi, a crewed Starship flight to Mars before 2030 shows a modest 13% chance, though that market is thinly traded at just $52,405.

The 350 million options are a different story. They vested in January, carry a strike of $8.3998, and run to 2031. Musk would need about $2.94 billion in cash to convert them into stock worth roughly $52 billion.

What Changes Before June 2027

None of it is sellable yet. Musk agreed to a 366-day lock-up when SpaceX priced its IPO in June, and his shares carry no early-release triggers. His date is June 12, 2027.

Other holders exit first. Roughly 319 million shares are issued for free on Thursday, one of several tranches running through 2027. Anyone modeling the eventual Musk supply should use 4.77 billion shares, not 6.42 billion.

Traders who wanted SpaceX without the queue found other routes. Three SpaceX tokens launched on Solana the day the stock listed, and they settle around the clock. The founder holds the least liquid position in his own company.

One number did not move. Musk voted on the restricted shares, whether they ever vest or not, which left him with 82.4% of the vote at listing. His stake shrank on paper. His control never did.

Source: BeInCrypto