Elon Musk is halfway to becoming a trillionaire

Forbes called it on Wednesday just before market close, citing its Real-Time Billionaires tracker. The milestone fell following a spike in Tesla's share price. (Much of Musk's wealth is tied to the performance of that company's stock, which has doubled since an April earnings call, when he said he would once again be focusing much of his time on the automaker.)

Tesla's stock has slipped a bit since then and Musk's net worth, as of 11:30 a.m. ET, was pegged at $494 billion.

Bloomberg's Billionaire Tracker, meanwhile, puts Musk's net worth at a mere $470 billion. (The two outlets calculate the value of high-wealth individuals in different ways — and begin to diverge on billionaire rankings at the seventh position down the list.)

Musk is potentially in line for a much larger payday in the years to come. Earlier this month, Tesla asked shareholders to approve a pay package for Musk that would give him $1 trillion over the next 10 years, as long as the company clears a series of high performance hurdles, with the highest being a market cap of $8.5 trillion. The pay package also would require Tesla to hit certain EBITDA and delivery milestones.

Musk currently owns 12% of Tesla's outstanding shares. If he hits all of the milestones in this proposed package, that would increase to 24%. In addition, Musk holds a controlling interest in SpaceX, which last December considered a tender offer that valued that company at $350 billion.