Tesla CEO Elon Musk Becomes the Richest Man in World

Published On: 8 January 2021
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk overtakes Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to become the world’s richest man

Elon Musk, Tesla Inc & SpaceX CEO, becomes the world’s richest man surpassing Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. The South African-born billionaire’s net worth at present is $188.5 billion dollar at 10:15 am in New York on Wednesday. This is $1.5 billion dollar more than Amazon founder Jeff Bezos who has held the top spot since October 2017. Besides this, Elon Musk who is the CEO of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX is also a rival to Bezos, who happens to be the owner of Blue Origin LLC, in the private space race. Musk, who owns 20 percent shares of Tesla, was at the 35th position in the list of the richest persons in the world at the start of 2020. A 4.8 percent rise in Tesla’s share price has pushed Musk to the top spot.

If we talk about Amazon’s market capitalization, it is $1.6 trillion dollars and is far higher than Tesla’s $760 billion (approx). However, Amazon’s share price has been stagnant in recent months which in turn has affected Bezos’s net worth. Musk, on the other hand, has categorically benefitted from Tesla’s stratospheric rise in more than one way. As per the sources, “In addition to his 20 percent stake in the automaker, he’s sitting on about $42 billion of unrealized paper gains on vested stock options. Those securities come from two grants he received in 2012 and 2018, the latter of which was the largest pay deal ever struck between a CEO and a corporate board.”

Musk’s latest gains are specifically due to the rise in the Tesla share price by more than sevenfold this year. The demand for electric cars has literally soared with the government announcing the measures to discontinue the use of internal combustion engines. Furthermore, the market value of Tesla Cars exceeded $700 billion for the first time this week. This in turn made the company more valuable than Toyota, Volkswagen, Hyundai, GM, and Ford combined.

Besides these, Tesla is all set to make its entry into the Indian market by launching its first model namely Model 3 in June this year.