Commentary: Is Elon Musk really a 'trillionaire'? Only on paper

See more from the L.A.Times in Google Search.

Set us as preferred Well, that’s a fun ride, isn’t it?SpaceX, which is controlled by Elon Musk, went public on June 12 at a stratospheric valuation that made Musk the first trillionaire in history.He retained that status, according to Bloomberg’s billionaires index, for 11 days after the initial public offering, or until the stock price drifted back to Earth and Musk’s fortune fell to as low as $942 billion, by Bloomberg’s reckoning.On Monday and Tuesday, his fortune crept back to a hair above $1 trillion as SpaceX gained 11.5% and and Tesla, Musk’s other public company, gained 10.8%.

These are the core of his net worth, which Bloomberg put at $1.01 trillion Monday and Tuesday.You only set up an IPO like this to enable insiders to dump their stakes.— Musk critic will LockettYet the tsunami of publicity about Musk’s trillionaireship dodges an important question: Has he ever really been a trillionaire? The answer, if one examines the basis for the claim, is no.At best, he is a trillionaire on paper, but even that description is dubious.

One reason for the fascination with Musk’s status as a “trillionaire” may be the very human difficulty of grasping such a big number.We can comprehend 1 million, and even that 1 billion is one thousand millions.

But a trillion — in other words, one thousand billions? In his classic book “Innumeracy,” mathematician John Allen Paulos observed that people are inclined to think that 1 trillion and 1 billion are about as close together as 1 billion and 1 million.They’re not.

In his book, Paulos tries to illustrate the difference by noting that the passage of 1 million seconds would put us back by about two weeks, the elapsed time of 1 billion seconds would be a little less than 32 years, and 1 trillion seconds was nearly 32,000 years ago — back to the paleolithic era, the dawn of modern humans and tens of thousands of years before the beginning of reco...