Elon Musk had a very bad day, for a billionaire. The 45-year-old business magnate’s passion project, the SpaceX Falcon 9, exploded to smithereens Thursday morning on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral.
The unmanned $62 million rocket, which was not scheduled for liftoff until September 3rd, exploded during a routine test launch. The massive explosion set back plans to put a satellite over the equator to expand communications in Europe, the Middle East and Africa for an unknown amount of time.
The Amos-6 satellite, which Facebook and French satellite provider Eutelsat were paying a reported $95 million a year to lease bandwidth on the satellite for five years, was inside the rocket and now is in a billion pieces.
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According to CNBC, the disaster caused an even bigger disaster in the value of the companies Elon Musk owns a massive stake in.
Shares of Musk’s electric car maker, Tesla, were down more than 4.5 percent Thursday afternoon and were on pace for their worst week since Brexit. According to FactSet, Musk owns more than 31 million shares, making the billionaire’s loss about $325 million as of late afternoon.
And at SolarCity, where Musk is chairman, shares were down 10 percent Thursday. He owns more than 22 million shares of the company, according to FactSet, making his daily loss roughly $44 million with slightly more than an hour left in the trading day.
The dual-hits resulted in a $370 million loss for Musk. When you consider that Elon is worth an estimated $12 billion, the loss likely serves as more of an ego hit than a financial one.
At the end of the day, he’s going home to his million dollar mansion and I just texted my roommates to leave the apartment for a bit while I tried to get laid. Who’s the real loser here?
P.S. The GDP of Micronesia is an estimated $320 million.
[h/t CNBC]