Elon Musk Now Worth $115 Billion, Becomes the Third Richest Person in the World

Elon Musk, after making headlines last week Friday for introducing a group of pigs with mind-reading brain implants during an event at Neuralink’s headquarters in Fremont, California, today Musk is not making headlines for weirder innovations, instead on a positive note, according to Bloomberg, his net worth is now $115 billion, pushing him past Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the list of the world’s richest people.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Musk’s increase in wealth was propelled by Tesla’s wild 12% stock gain that happened Monday after Tesla’s 5-1 stock split. This makes the Tesla founder and CEO the third-richest person in the world, making him now only poorer than Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.The world’s top five billionaires (in order) are: Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Bernard Arnault, the CEO of LVMH in France.

Musk is also the founder of several other companies including SpaceX, The Boring Company, Hyperloop and OpenAI. Tesla’s stock has already soared about 500% in 2020, and the company is now worth about $475 billion. Musk’s pay package, which was approved by Tesla shareholders in 2018, doesn’t pay him any salary or cash bonuses. Instead, the CEO gets paid in millions of stock options, worth billions of dollars. He has received two multi-billion-dollar payouts as the company hit certain profit and stock price thresholds, and he is due to receive another soon.

Musk owns more than 18% of the company’s shares, more than three times the next-largest stockholder. So as Tesla’s stock boomed, Musk’s net worth exploded by nearly $90 billion this year, catapulting him through the middle of the pack to the top three.

In January 2020, Musk’s net worth was about $32 billion, with half of that wealth composed of Tesla shares, according to Forbes and Bloomberg estimates at the time. Musk’s holding is about to get diluted somewhat: Just one day after the stock split, the company announced plans to sell up to about $5 billion in new shares, according to a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Shares fell about 1% Tuesday.