Elon Musk lost his trillionaire status Wednesday after sliding SpaceX shares cut more than $50 billion from his net worth—and the same establishment press that spent years demanding his deplatforming couldn't wait to report the loss, while ignoring what he's actually building on the factory floor.
Why it matters: The people who control the narrative in this country root against builders because builders threaten the regulator class that signs their paychecks. Musk's wealth dip is a headline; the fact that he's retooling American manufacturing lines to produce humanoid robots is buried.
Forbes framed the story around the loss—Musk's fortune peaked at $1.45 trillion after SpaceX's historic IPO last month before plummeting share prices erased more than $300 billion. The outlet also noted that Forbes removed $116 billion of Musk's restricted Tesla stock from its estimates after Tesla replaced his 2018 CEO performance award with a new one requiring him to stay in a senior leadership role through January 2028. The framing: watch the rich man fall.
Buried in the same Forbes report was the tell: Mark Zuckerberg's net worth swelled $19.1 billion to $212.6 billion the same day, as Meta shares soared more than 10% on news the company plans to sell access to AI computing power. The man who built his empire on surveillance and censorship gains; the man who reopened free speech on his platform loses. The press doesn't find that contrast worth examining.
Meanwhile, Musk was walking the Optimus production line at Tesla's Fremont facility. According to Benzinga, Musk shared a photo with employees on X with the caption, "Walking the Optimus production line in Fremont." During Tesla's fourth-quarter 2025 earnings call, Musk said the company targets producing a million units of the Optimus robot.
Tesla VP of Vehicle Engineering Lars Moravy told influencer Herbert Ong that the first production line has landed at Fremont and installation has begun. "Optimus is smaller than a car," Moravy said, "so the bring-up can be quite quick." He said Optimus production will require 40 lines due to the number of actuators and intricate designs of the limbs and torso.
Moravy also revealed that Tesla vehicles now "drive themselves from the end of line to the logistics yard" and go over a "bump, squeak, and rattle track" that listens for noises and cracks. "We call it Full-Self Hearing," Moravy said, noting the system uses the car's built-in microphones but still requires some training and human intervention.
Tesla shares were up 1.65% to $418.62 in pre-market trading Wednesday. Ross Gerber of Gerber Kawasaki called it a "solid" quarter after predicting sales would rise following gas price surges tied to the Iran war.
The press celebrates when Musk's paper wealth dips. They said nothing when he bought X and gave Americans back a public square. They said nothing when SpaceX broke the government monopoly on spaceflight. Now they say nothing while he puts American workers on a production line building something the world has never seen. The question isn't why Musk's stock whipsaws—it's why the people who report on it always seem to be rooting for the whipsaw.
