Elon Musk Dethrones Jeff Bezos to Become World’s Richest Person

Elon Musk, the brains behind Tesla Inc. and SpaceX, just after recently pushing past Microsoft founder turned philanthropist Bill Gates at $127.7bn net worth to become the second-richest person in the world, weeks after he passed Mark Zuckerberg, according to Bloomberg is now the world’s richest person.

Yesterday Jeff Bezos’s total wealth as per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index stood at $184 billion. Whereas Elon Musk was just below Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos at number with a total wealth of $181 billion, but a 4.8% rally in the electric carmaker’s share price Thursday boosted Musk past Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index a ranking of the world’s 500 wealthiest people.

Over the past year Musk’s worth soared by more than $150 billion in possibly the fastest bout of wealth creation in history. Fueling his rise was an unprecedented rally in Tesla’s share price, which surged 743% in 2020 on the back of consistent profits, inclusion in the S&P 500 Index and enthusiasm from Wall Street and retail investors alike.

The South Africa-born engineer’s net worth was $188.5 billion at 10:15 a.m. in New York, $1.5 billion more than Bezos, who has held the top spot since October 2017. As chief executive officer of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, Musk is also a rival to Bezos, owner of Blue Origin LLC, in the private space race.

The jump in Tesla’s stock price further inflates a valuation light-years apart from other automakers on numerous metrics. Tesla produced just over half-a-million cars last year, a fraction of the output of Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Co. The company is poised for further near-term gains as Democrats captured both Georgia Senate seats and handed control of Congress to the party that’s advocated for quicker adoption of electric vehicles.

According to data we just pulled from S&P Global, that is exactly double what Tesla has made in aggregate revenues since Elon Musk took delivery of the first Roadster back in 2008. It’s often said that democracies get the leaders they deserve, but in this case, investors have got the market they deserve. And its divine leader is our Elon. All hail the king of efficient markets.

Stock Options

Musk, 49, has benefited from Tesla’s stratospheric rise in more than one way. In addition to his 20% stake in the automaker, he’s sitting on about $42 billion of unrealized paper gains on vested stock options. Those securities come from two grants he received in 2012 and 2018, the latter of which was the largest pay deal ever struck between a CEO and a corporate board.

Despite his astronomical gains, Musk has said he has little interest in material things and has few assets outside his stakes in Tesla and SpaceX. He told Axel Springer in an interview last month that the main purpose of his wealth is to accelerate humanity’s evolution into a spacefaring civilization. “I want to be able to contribute as much as possible to the city on Mars,” Musk said. “That means just a lot of capital.”

The world’s 500 richest people added a record $1.8 trillion to their combined net worth last year, equivalent to a 31% increase. The gains were disproportionately at the top, where five individuals hold fortunes in excess of $100 billion and another 20 are worth at least $50 billion.

China’s Zhong Shanshan has also set a new wealth record. The chairman of Nongfu Spring Co., a bottled-water company that’s ubiquitous in China, is now richer than Warren Buffett as his fortune surged $13.5 billion to $91.7 billion since the start of the year. He is now the world’s sixth wealthiest person.

Zhong dethroned India’s Mukesh Ambani as Asia’s wealthiest person last week. Mukesh Ambani is world’s 13th richest person of the world holding total net worth of $73.9 Billion. (with Bloomberg inputs)