Elon Musk is well on pace to become the world’s first trillionaire as early as 2027, according to a report from a group that tracks wealth. Informa Connect Academy’s finding about the CEO of the private rocket company SpaceX and electric carmaker Tesla stems from the easily noticeable fact that his wealth has been increasing at an average annual rate of 110%. He, who is also the owner of social media platform X and CEO of artificial intelligence company xAI, is currently world’s wealthiest person.

The academy’s analysis also suggested that Indian business magnate Gautam Adani would become the second to achieve trillionaire status. That would seemingly happen in the year 2028 if his annual growth rate persists at 123%. Jensen Huang (tech firm Nvidia’s chief executive officer) and Prajogo Pangestu (the Indonesian energy and mining mogul) could also become trillionaires in the year 2028 if their trajectories hold. Bernard Arnault (the LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton boss and the world’s third-wealthiest person with about $200bn) is on track to become trillionaire in 2030 – the same year as the CEO of Meta (Mark Zuckerberg).

Only a handful of companies have secured valuations upwards of $1tn. Berkshire Hathaway most lately topped the valuation in late August, just days before its architect Warren Buffett celebrated his 94th birthday. Nvidia joined the $1tn club last year in May and in June hit $3tn, placing it at the time after Microsoft and before Apple as the world’s second-most-valuable company.

But, as CNBC noted, the question of who might be the world’s first trillionaire has captivated the public ever since the world crowned its first billionaire in 1916. That was the US’s John D Rockefeller, the founder and at the time biggest shareholder of Standard Oil. Despite that appeal, many academics see the accumulation of huge wealth as a social ill. One report calculated that the wealthiest 1% of humanity account for more carbon emissions – a principal driver of the ongoing climate crisis – than the poorest 66%.

Just days before Informa Connect Academy reported that Musk is most likely to become the globe’s first trillionaire, one of his posts on X earned him backlash from several of the site’s users. His post said an interview between Tucker Carlson (a former Fox News host) and the podcaster Darryl Cooper – a fellow rightwing media figure – was “very interesting. Worth watching.”

Cooper had claimed in the interview that the Nazis did not really mean to murder so many people when they carried out the Holocaust and slew 6 million Jews during the second world war. Instead, Darryl Cooper remarked, Hitler’s Nazi regime simply was not equipped to care for them – and he put the blame squarely on the British prime minister Winston Churchill for “that war becoming what it did”. Musk eventually deleted his post, and the White House condemned Tucker Carlson’s interview of Darryl Cooper as “a disgusting and sadistic insult to all Americans”.