Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, among others, can call himself richer than Microsoft founder and benefactor Bill Gates since Monday.
The 49-year-old Musk’s fortune rose by the rising share price of Tesla by $ 7.2 billion to a total of $ 127.9 billion.
Musk has already seen his net worth increase by $ 100.3 billion this year, making it the fastest riser on Bloomberg’s billionaires’ index, a ranking of the 500 richest people in the world. In January he was still in 35th place.
Musk’s rapid rise in the rankings is mainly due to Tesla, whose total value is currently some 600 billion dollars. About 75 percent of Musk’s net worth is in Tesla shares, which are worth about four times his share in space company SpaceX.
2020 has been a lucrative year for the super-rich for the time being.
Despite the pandemic and a global wave of layoffs affecting mostly the world’s working people and poor, people on the Bloomberg billionaires index have become 23 percent richer since the year began, some $ 1.3 trillion.