The founder of Tesla and SpaceX is the richest person in the world, with a personal fortune of $259bn
Elon Musk, founder and chief executive of electric vehicle maker Tesla and rocket company SpaceX, is the world’s richest person, with a current net worth of $259 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Mr Musk’s enormous fortune far exceeds that of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — the world’s second-wealthiest person, with a net worth of $180bn — by $79bn.
The 50-year-old was first crowned the world’s richest person in January this year, when his net worth was valued at $273.5bn by Bloomberg, which compared his wealth with John D Rockefeller.
“Mr Musk reached the level of riches, inflation-adjusted, achieved by modern history’s wealthiest person,” Bloomberg said at the time. However, a combination of volatile stock markets, the Russia-Ukraine crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic has taken a toll on Mr Musk’s net worth, which has fallen by 4.1 per cent — or $11bn — since the beginning of the year, according to Bloomberg.
Just last week, Mr Musk was also declared the richest person in the world by Forbes magazine in its annual 2022 World Billionaires List with a personal fortune of $219bn.
The Forbes list used stock prices and exchange rates from March 11 to calculate Mr Musk’s net worth, whereas the Bloomberg Billionaires Index is updated daily.
“Even after selling billions of dollars of Tesla stock late last year, and owing taxes on gains from those sales, Musk is an estimated $68bn richer than a year ago,” Forbes said in the report.
Meanwhile, the relative value of Mr Musk’s net worth of $259bn means he could buy 132 million troy ounces (4.1 million kilograms) of gold, while it is the equivalent of 3.34 per cent of the total wealth of the 500 richest people in the world and 3.84 million times the median US household income, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
It also means that Mr Musk could afford to buy Twitter six times over his current offer of roughly $43bn.
On Thursday, Mr Musk offered to buy 100 per cent of the microblogging social media platform at $54.20 per cent per share. His offer price represents a 38 per cent premium on the closing price of Twitter’s stock on April 1, the last trading day before his investment of 9.2 per in the company was publicly announced.
Last week, Mr Musk became Twitter’s single largest shareholder following his acquisition of about 73.5 million shares of the social media giant valued at about $3bn.
The South African born, Canadian-American businessman, who has seven children, owns about 17 per cent of Tesla, according to a February 2021 regulatory filing.
His stake in privately held SpaceX is valued at about $40.3bn, according to Bloomberg. Mr Musk has a history of posting market-moving tweets to stoke interest in his ventures, which has drawn the ire of the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
In March, Bitcoin, Ether and Dogecoin were given a quick boost after he tweeted that he owns the digital tokens and isn’t planning to sell.
In response, Bitcoin, which had fallen as much as 2.9 per cent before Mr Musk’s tweet, wiped out its losses then retreated again. Ether was also up as much as 2.3 per cent before giving up some gains, while Dogecoin rose 3.8 per cent.
In November, Tesla’s shares fell as much as 4.5 per cent at the start of trading in New York, having dropped nearly 7 per cent in premarket trading after Mr Musk asked his more than 80 million followers on Twitter whether he should sell 10 per cent of his holdings in the electric vehicle maker. A clear majority (58 per cent) of the 3.5 million Twitter users who voted said yes.
Mr Musk made his first millions in the 1990s, when he sold his first company, Zip2, for more than $300m. He then launched X.com, an online payment system that eventually became PayPal, which he sold to eBay for $1.5bn in 2022, according to Bloomberg.
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