Do not let Elon try and split the appetizers—he can cover the jalapeño poppers all by himself. The tech entrepreneur became the world’s first trillionaire yesterday after SpaceX’s first day of trading sent the company’s stock up as much as 30% from its listing price of $135 to over $176 per share. At a time of unprecedented wealth inequality, Musk’s net worth catapulted to $1.1 trillion, according to Forbes.

SpaceX closed up 19% yesterday with a valuation of $2.1 trillion, making it the sixth most valuable public company in the US (and bigger than Musk’s other company, Tesla). Musk, who owns nearly half of the available SpaceX shares, will likely watch his net worth rise and fall by tens of millions as the stock fluctuates. And because the majority of Musk’s wealth is tied up in his publicly held companies, his trillion dollars isn’t liquid.

How much money is $1 trillion?

You can’t even compare Musk’s wealth to other rich people. The founders of Google, Amazon, Oracle, and Meta combined have ~$1.3 trillion. Musk is now on par with the economies of entire countries: Only 21 countries have GDPs over $1 trillion.

If your household brings in $84,000 a year (the US median income for 2024), it would take you 12 million years to make a trillion dollars, according to NBC. For a physical representation: if you painstakingly laid out one trillion single dollar bills end to end, it would stretch the distance of 200 round trips to the moon. With $1 trillion dollars, you could give everyone in the world (~8.2 billion people) $122. Or you could buy…

• Every piece of property in Houston for $879 billion.
• 243 billion gallons of gas at $4.11 a gallon. For context, Americans only bought 137 billion gallons of gas last year.
• Every carmaker in the US (excluding Tesla), Europe, and Japan…and still have $100 billion leftover.

It wasn’t just Musk who got richer. His entire inner circle of early SpaceX investors made a killing, minting several new billionaires, while early employees who had amassed stock in the company scored millions.—MM

The US and Iran have “agreed upon text” of a peace deal, Pakistan’s PM says. Though mediators are still working to finalize the agreement, the US and Iran have agreed to wording of a peace deal, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said on X yesterday. “Peace has never been this close as it is now,” Sharif said. Officials from both countries appeared to confirm that a deal was close, while stressing that nothing had yet been signed. The proposed deal reportedly includes Iran opening the Strait of Hormuz and getting economic incentives as it meets additional US demands, potentially leaving the status of Iran’s nuclear program for future negotiations.

Paramount’s takeover of WBD gets the DOJ green light. The Justice Department’s Antitrust Division has approved the $111 billion deal for Paramount Skydance to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery, signing off without requiring any concessions or divestitures, according to Politico. While it’s a big win for a deal that’s had plenty of drama and has drawn opposition from movie industry heavyweights, it’s not quite a Hollywood ending yet. It could still face legal challenges from states, including California, where the attorney general has been reviewing the deal.

Celebrated artist David Hockney dies at age 88. The artist died peacefully at home on Thursday, with only a month to go until his 89th birthday, according to his publicist. Hockney, who was born in England, first became a renowned artist in London. But he spent much of his adult life in California, creating his famous paintings of swimming pools. Though he was well-known for his use of colorful acrylic paint, Hockney also worked with other types of media, such as collage, photography, and digital drawing. One painting he made in 1972 set an auction record for the highest price for a living artist when it sold for $90 million in 2018. He is survived by his partner Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima. “The world is very, very beautiful, if you look at it, but most people don’t look very much, do they?” Hockney said in 2019.—AR

In honor of President Trump’s 80th birthday and America’s 250th anniversary, a bunch of dudes are gonna beat the freedom out of each other tomorrow night during a $60+ million UFC event that’ll take place on the same grounds where kids roll Easter Eggs each year.

Attendees at the UFC Freedom 250 event will include political leaders, CEOs, and celebrities picked by Trump, UFC CEO Dana White, and Ari Emanuel, CEO of UFC parent company TKO. For those who can’t be there, the spectacle will stream exclusively on Paramount+.

TKO is footing the bill and is expecting to lose $30 million, even with sponsorships from companies including Ram Trucks, Crypto.com, and Monster Energy. But immediate profit isn’t the point:

• “We see this once-in-a-lifetime stage as a strategic investment to drive subscriber acquisition at Paramount+,” TKO’s president recently said. That matters to UFC because it struck a seven-year, $7.7 billion deal last August that moved its matches from ESPN to Paramount+.
• TKO and UFC execs have said they expect Super Bowl-like exposure, but a senior columnist at The Athletic doubts it: Super Bowl LX drew 125 million viewers domestically, according to Nielsen, while Paramount+ reportedly had 79 million global subscribers in February.

Let’s get ready to grumble: Yesterday, a judge rejected a lawsuit that attempted to stop the fights. But only 16% of Americans approve of tomorrow’s event, while 46% think it's inappropriate, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll.—ML