Elon Musk overtakes Jeff Bezos to become the richest person in the world



[ad_1]

Elon Musk has become the richest person on the planet, overtaking Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, thanks to the continued rise in Tesla’s stock price. Musk is now worth around $ 188 billion, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

“How strange”, Musk tweeted Thursday. “Well, back to work …”

Musk eclipsing Bezos’ extravagant personal wealth of around $ 187 billion marks the latest development in a multi-year rivalry between the two tech moguls – a rivalry often centered on the accomplishments of their respective companies.

Bezos was said to have been so envious of Musk’s success in securing a $ 1.3 billion incentive package for Tesla’s Nevada Gigafactory that it served as the genesis of Amazon’s beauty pageant style research. for its second seat. Bezos has a spaceflight company at Blue Origin, just like Musk does with SpaceX. The two men exchanged beards about their rockets and even fought for sacred NASA real estate. (SpaceX won this fight and is the only one of the two companies to successfully reach orbit.)

Musk just passed Bill Gates in November to become the second richest person in the world. The Tesla CEO has seen his personal wealth skyrocket in 2020 to over $ 150 billion, largely because Musk owns a lot of Tesla shares – about 20 percent of the company, in fact. And Tesla’s inventory has grown in incredibly valuable ways over the past year or so, as Musk brought the company out of what’s called “production hell” and dramatically increased sales of its vehicles. electric, thanks to the more affordable Model 3 sedan and the Model Y SUV. It coincided with an incredible increase in retail investors who were more willing to fully embrace Tesla’s story than many on Wall Street once were.

The billionaire CEO’s stock pool continues to grow, especially after he signed a major 10-year compensation package with the company in 2018, which again tied its earnings to Tesla’s share price and earnings targets. . He receives a series of stock options from the company each time a new milestone is reached; the first installment, which he received earlier this year, was worth some $ 800 million.

Like most billionaires, Musk only saw his overall wealth increase during the coronavirus pandemic. But unlike this peer group, Musk said in court to be “cash poor” and “financially illiquid” in 2019 and said last year that he would sell “almost all physical possessionsยป, Including its mansions. He takes loans on the stocks that make him so rich and puts that money back into his businesses, like when he dumped around $ 100 million into The Boring Company in 2018. Musk has long used his own personal wealth to fund new ones. companies, too, because he funded Tesla and SpaceX after becoming a millionaire with Zip2 and PayPal.

Musk is now perhaps the richest man on the planet by money-driven outlet standards like Bloomberg and Forbes, although they tend to focus on calculating knowable assets. However, authoritarian rulers like Vladimir Putin and Mohammed bin Salman are both extremely wealthy personally in a way that is more difficult to calculate and also have unquestionable access to the vast wealth of their nations.



[ad_2]

Source link