Elon Musk Passes Jeff Bezos As Richest Man In The World

Posted by: Kyeyune Andrew Jonathan in Business January 8, 2021

The controversial and enigmatic entrepreneur Elon Musk who heads SpaceX and Tesla has achieved a milestone that only three others have held in the last 20 years; the world’s richest person.

As he climbed to the top, Musk surpassed a bevy of billionaires this year including Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. He reached the apex on Thursday thanks to Tesla’s share price that has skyrocketed nearly 830% since March 2020. In addition to that, a substantive pay package was triggered after achieving certain capitalization and profitability milestones.

In this process, Musk scooped the top seat from his rival Jeff Bezos, the founder, and CEO of Amazon who previously held the world’s richest person position since 2017.

Elon Musk is currently worth more than $188 billion, per Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index. Tesla’s shares continued their seemingly unabated climb on Thursday, trading up to more than 5% to $795.75.

As expected, Musk acknowledged the milestone in a tweet noting, ‘’how strange’’ and ‘’well, back to work.’’

How strange
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 7, 2021

In all this, Musk’s speed to the top is the most intriguing factor about his newly acquired title, not just the title itself. Just a year ago, Musk was in the dregs of the world’s wealthiest list.

This year, Elon Musk was propelled forward by some $150 billion thanks to Tesla’s popping share price since he holds about 20% equity in Tesla. He also has some $42 billion invested in stock options, according to SEC filings.

In 2018, Tesla’s share price ended the year with about a 3.8% gain after suffering from stock volatility in previous years. In 2020, however, the company’s shares were on an upward trend. In 2021, and after only a decade as a publicly traded company, Tesla became the most valuable automaker in the world by market value.

Through this, they surpassed the valuations of Ford, GM, VW Group, and Toyota. Tesla’s market cap is now $757 billion.

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