Elon Musk has slipped out of the trillion-dollar club once again. A sharp drop in his core equity holdings shaved $37.1 billion off his fortune on Thursday, pulling his net worth down to $987 billion and snapping another brief run at the apex of global wealth.

The single-day 3.6 percent slide hit both sides of Musk’s empire. SpaceX equity tumbled roughly 3.5 percent after reports surfaced detailing massive debt plans, while Tesla shares slipped over 2 percent. Despite the pullback, Musk remains the world’s wealthiest person, up $532 billion over the past 12 months.

A volatile trillion-dollar ride

Musk first crossed the 13-figure threshold in June following SpaceX’s public debut, when his fortune briefly peaked near $1.45 trillion. He reclaimed the title earlier this week after a $65 billion rally on Monday lifted his balance sheet to $1.04 trillion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The latest market retreat comes as Musk looks to leverage SpaceX’s balance sheet for computing power. The rocket maker is currently in preliminary discussions with banks and credit investors to secure roughly $40 billion, earmarking the capital to purchase advanced artificial intelligence processors from Nvidia.

High-stakes race for Silicon

Fixed-income heavyweight Pacific Investment Management Co. is among the asset managers evaluating the proposed debt package, according to people familiar with the matter. The financing structure under review would include $10 billion in syndicated bank loans alongside $30 billion in investment-grade bonds.

Discussions remain fluid and may not result in a final deal, the people said. If completed, the transaction would rank among the largest corporate debt offerings backing the global AI buildout, testing lender appetite for high-ticket capital expenditures as tech giants race for scarce silicon.

Massive compute in Memphis

Musk has pitched SpaceX’s runway aggressively, telling prospective investors the space venture can generate $1 trillion in annual revenue by 2030. That optimism dovetails with his broader artificial intelligence offensive, which centers on expanding xAI’s flagship Colossus 2 data center campus in Memphis, Tennessee.

The Memphis facility houses 110,000 Nvidia GB200 processors and 440,000 GB300 units, Musk said last month. He plans to bring 220,000 more GB300s online shortly, followed by another 220,000 in November and an additional deployment by late December to fuel the compute cluster.