CEO of Tesla and multi-billionaire Elon Musk has just surpassed Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to become the world’s richest man for the first time on Thursday, based on calculations using the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Tesla shares closed 8% higher at $816 on Thursday, boosting the net worth of its CEO to over $186 billion. Meanwhile, Amazon’s shares closed less than 1% higher, lifting Bezos’ fortune to about $185 billion.
Majority of the wealth accumulated by Musk came in 2020 as his electric-vehicle company’s stock price rocketed up 740% in 2020. The share price came to a stand still during October period.
But later as Elon Musk’s SpaceX successfully launched a Falcon 9 with its Crew Dragon spacecraft Resilience and four astronauts on board to the International Space Station (ISS) the stock started picking even more pace in November. This initial surge pushed him to be the second richest person surpassing Bill Gates.
According to Bloomberg, The Tesla CEO’s fortune has ballooned by more than $150 billion in the past year. Tesla shares closed 8% higher at $816 on Thursday; this got him ahead of everybody in the list of richest person. Musk is also the primary shareholder and CEO of SpaceX, though SpaceX is privately held, so its value does not fluctuate as much as the value of Tesla.
As per Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, a ranking of the world’s 500 wealthiest people, Musk is worth $194.8 billion or $9.5 billion more than Bezos.
While anyone of us would be going nuts over being a millionaire but the owner of $195 billion was rather cool and came up with a rather underwhelming response to his crowning glory moment. Elon calmy tweeted, “How Strange!” and later followed up with “Well, back to work.”
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