Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, PayPal and SpaceX, has just become the richest man in the world. With a fortune estimated at nearly 190 billion dollars, the eccentric businessman dethrones Jeff Bezos, the illustrious CEO of Amazon. Elon Musk owes the impressive increase in his fortune to the frenzied surge in Tesla’s stock market.
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Elon Musk is now richer than Jeff Bezos, boss of Amazon, Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, Bernard Arnault, CEO of LVMH, and Mark Zuckerberg, creator of the social network Facebook, report our colleagues from Bloomberg. The media indeed keeps up to date a ranking of the 500 richest people in the world, the famous Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Last September, Elon Musk still had to settle for the title of 3rd richest man in the world.
Bloomberg believes that Elon Musk currently hasa fortune of 188.5 billion dollars, “Only” 1.5 billion more than Jeff Bezos. Unsurprisingly, the fortune of the engineer of South African origin rests mainly on the success of Tesla, in which he holds an 18% stake. Elon Musk’s income is closely linked to the profits made by the auto company. The man has indeed negotiated advantageous compensation in the form of bonuses with the board of directors. Concretely, Musk pockets 1% of Tesla shares when the price exceeds a certain threshold and the turnover reaches a new milestone.
Elon Musk claims half of his fortune is spent on building a city on Mars
During the year 2020, Tesla’s stock market soared 700% despite the health and economic crisis. In the first days of 2021, the stock rose 15%. Recently, the firm even passed the $ 700 billion mark in valuation for the first time. Yet Tesla sells far fewer cars than direct competitors. The automaker only sold 499,550 cars last year, compared to 11 million for a company like Volkswagen.
On the same topic: Tesla narrowly escaped bankruptcy, reveals Elon Musk
In response to Bloomberg’s announcement, Elon Musk pinned a tweet from 2018 to his Twitter account. “You should be asking yourself why I want the money. The reason is not what you think. I have very little time for leisure. No vacation homes or yachts or anything like that ” said Elon Musk. On the contrary, the billionaire assures that “Half of my money is for helping problems on Earth”. The other half of his fortune would be dedicated to “Establish an autonomous city on Mars to ensure the continuity of life in case the Earth is hit by a meteor like in the days of the dinosaurs”. Is Elon Musk also the most far-sighted man in the world?
Source: Bloomberg
