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Tesla CEO Elon Musk beat Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to become the second richest person in the world on Tuesday.
Shares in the electric carmaker surged after the Trump administration announced on Monday that it had begun the process of transitioning to President-elect Joe Biden – a clean energy advocate.
Musk’s net worth has grown by around $ 100 billion since the start of the year, propelling him past Gates for a few hours before leveling off, with both fortunes listed at $ 128 billion, according to Bloomberg. Billionaires Index.
Musk’s enormous personal fortune comes mainly from owning 20% of Tesla and 54% of his space transportation company SpaceX.
Earlier this year, the 49-year-old tech pioneer ad that he was going to sell almost all of his “physical possessions” and “own no houses”, claiming he didn’t want to be attacked again for being a billionaire.
“In recent years ‘billionaire’ has become a derogatory thing. It’s like it’s a bad thing,” Musk told podcast host Joe Rogan in May. He has sold and put some of his California properties on the market since then, Forbes reported.
“I have a bunch of houses, but I don’t spend a lot of time in most of them,” Musk told Rogan. “That doesn’t sound like a good use of assets. Someone could probably take advantage of these houses and make better use of them than I do.
Gates would still be ahead of Musk without his philanthropic efforts. Gates and his wife, Melinda, have donated nearly $ 50 billion over the past 25 years, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Musk donated around $ 100 million.
Although $ 54 billion still separates Musk from the top spot – held by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, whose fortune is listed at $ 182 billion – Tesla debuts on the S&P 500 index next month. could reduce this margin. Tesla first hit a market cap of $ 500 billion on Tuesday, and Musk’s net worth jumped nearly $ 20 billion last week.
The tech sector has thrived throughout the coronavirus-induced lockdowns, with stocks such as Amazon surging nearly 100% since the start of the pandemic and Netflix’s market capitalization increasing by around $ 100 billion .
Bezos’ personal fortune grew by $ 67 billion last year, and his ex-wife was for a short time the richest woman in the world earlier this year. As part of her divorce, MacKenzie Scott, novelist and philanthropist, received a 4% stake in Amazon.
Yet the Bloomberg Billionaires Index also highlights the growing socio-economic divide between Wall Street and Main Street in America.
From 1989 to 2016, the wealth gap between the richest and poorest families in the United States more than doubled, according to the Pew Research Center, a trend now exacerbated by the pandemic. As CEOs like Musk and Bezos continue to see their fortunes grow, small business owners and millions of unemployed Americans struggle to survive the economic crisis brought on by the pandemic.
While most of the billionaires on the Bloomberg List generate their wealth from stocks and not from their annual salary, the growing pay gap between executives and workers has been a bone of contention for decades.
It even triggered an “overpaid executive tax,” passed in San Francisco this month. Officially known as Proposition L, the ruling will levy a tax on any company doing business in San Francisco where a senior executive earns more than 100 times more than their “typical local worker.”
Companies whose senior executives fall into this category must pay an additional 0.1% on their annual taxes. The surtax increases by 0.1% by a factor of 100, reaching 0.6%.
Elon Musk currently earns nearly 2 million times more than the average American household, while Jeff Bezos currently earns 2.6 million times more, according to Bloomberg.
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