Elon Musk rolled out X Money on July 27, a digital wallet and debit card system that lets Americans hold and transfer money without banking gatekeepers — the same week his own net worth cratered by roughly $750 billion on paper.
X Money gives users a deposit account, fee-free peer-to-peer transfers, and a metal Visa debit card tied to their X handle, according to Fortune. Visa signed on as the first partner in early 2025. The service began rolling out to Premium and Premium+ subscribers on July 27, the same week Musk's fortune was sliding below $700 billion for the first time since December. It is the first concrete product from a plan Musk first floated in a 2022 investor pitch deck, where he described X as eventually rivaling China's WeChat.
This is the financial infrastructure the founders would have built — control your own money, free from the banking cartels and government surveillance that have repeatedly frozen accounts for wrongthink. Musk posted "This is money" on X at launch. The message was unmistakable: build parallel systems while you still can.
The timing was stranger than fiction. Days before the rollout, Musk told The Economist that money "won't matter" by 2036, arguing AI and robotics will eventually produce more goods and services than anyone could consume. When asked how displaced workers would earn a living, Musk said the Treasury could simply issue checks, according to Benzinga. He has made similar arguments for months, telling XPRIZE founder Peter Diamandis that "money will stop being relevant at some point in the future."
Fortune noted the irony: the man declaring money obsolete just launched a payment product. Musk also posted "(Former) Trillionaire" on July 24, a rare public concession. Forbes pegged his net worth at roughly $695.7 billion, down from a $1.45 trillion peak on June 16 — a paper loss roughly equal to the combined net worth of Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Jeff Bezos. The Deseret News reported the figure at $708 billion as of midday Tuesday, with an additional $7.6 billion in losses over the prior 24 hours.
The slide is driven almost entirely by SpaceX stock, which has fallen more than 50% from its June 16 high. Shares were trading just over $115 on Tuesday, down from a high near $225 and below both the IPO price of $135 and the market debut of $150, per the Deseret News. SpaceX's pre-IPO filings show the company brought in $18.7 billion in revenue in 2025 but lost almost $5 billion. Only Starlink has turned a profit. The first earnings report is set for Aug. 4, and up to 911.5 million insider shares could be freed from lockup on Aug. 6 — a potential flood that could push prices even lower.
Washington smelled blood. Senator Bernie Sanders posted on X that if Musk truly believes money won't matter, he should back a 5% wealth tax on billionaires. "The fact that he doesn't tells you everything you need to know," Sanders said, per Benzinga. Nobel Prize-winning economist Daron Acemoglu urged Musk to pledge his fortune to charity by 2036. Musk responded: "I am actually going to do something along these lines!" He has repeatedly opposed wealth taxes, saying he paid more than $10 billion in taxes in a single year and that taxing billionaires alone would not close the deficit — that requires "taxing the living daylights out of everyone."
Musk is building the alternative financial rails while his own fortune burns and the political class circles for a cut. The question is whether X Money becomes the tool that frees ordinary Americans from financial gatekeepers — or whether the gatekeepers crush it before it scales.
