[acdha]

Beyond the basic greed which causes someone to become a billionaire in the first place, his wealth is almost entirely in equities rather than hard assets and the same volatility which made him set wealth records could easily move him back down the list. Most of his companies were substantially boosted by government funding and he has had a number of legal cases where adverse government decisions could significantly impact the share price of his companies. For example, the NTSB forcing Tesla to stop selling FSD under false pretenses or doing a safety recall; or removal of the tariffs keeping BYD out of the U.S. market would lower Tesla share prices which are ¾ of his net worth. SpaceX is most of the rest and that goes up or down based on things like whether NASA hires them or they’re forced to pay for environmental damages.

There are tons of non-obvious concerns: Starlink is in the news with the special FAA contract (part of why they want control of the GSA is that Starlink isn’t on the general Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions contract, making it harder for agencies to buy) but it even includes things like whether the FTC regulates or other parts of the government subsidize Bitcoin since a big chunk of Tesla’s reported profits come from unrealized Bitcoin gains.