What It Takes To Become a Trillionaire, According To Mark Cuban
Written by
J. Arky
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Amen Oyiboke
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Having a net worth of over $390 billion has Elon Musk the richest man in the world. Now the Tesla and SpaceX founder is reaching new heights in politics, but might not ascend to a higher tax bracket by becoming the world’s first trillionaire, as many foresee.
One person who doubts this happening is Mark Cuban, a man with considerable wealth himself, but does not see Musk as the one to claim the historic title of trillionaire.
“The world’s first trillionaires are going to come from somebody who masters AI and all its derivatives and applies it in ways we never thought of,” Cuban said at SXSW in 2017, at a time when artificial intelligence (AI) was not a popular concept, let alone a real concept that people interfaced with daily.
Now, in 2025, Cuban’s words hold more power than ever, as AI starts to find its way into every aspect of the job market, meaning that it could potentially be the next workforce. Currently, more than half of businesses today use some sort of AI in their operations.
AI has expanded from chatbots into industries like manufacturing, health care, business, and entertainment. It has a $196 billion market with a 36.6% projected annual growth and is expected to add $19.9 trillion to the global economy by 2030, according to Benzinga.
Cuban might be right in terms of harnessing AI to create the world’s first trillionaire, but he does not believe that will be accomplished by Musk or Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon. Instead, Cuban thinks this person will be crowned with such wealth in ways that no one can see or understand at this point.
It could be someone within the global business elite or someone who studied philosophy in order to better understand and solve complicated problems within human nature. This, he argued, could be as much of an asset as technical skills are in the AI economy to come. Cuban could not say for sure who would be the first trillionaire, nor how they would create their vast empire of wealth.
What Cuban did urge is for those looking to stay ahead of the curve to keep learning, growing, and evolving in their fields to not be left behind when AI ramps up. By doing that, it could be possible to see the first-ever trillionaire in the not-too-distant future.
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