49-year-old billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk is officially the world’s second-richest person after he added $100.3 billion to his net worth this year to surpass Bill Gates who formerly occupied the position.
The Telsa CEO accumulated an impressive $127.9bn (£95.8bn) to his name which saw him take the title of the second richest man in the world. He owes the rise to a surge in Tesla’s share price.
Musk who was in 35th place in January on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index has outranked everyone else on the world’s 500 richest people list.
He is now ranked behind Amazon boss Jeff Bezos who is the richest man in the world with $182bn (£136bn). Some days ago, the space engineer was $8billion (£6bn) away from outgrowing the Microsoft co-founder’s wealth. However, the percentage rise in Tesla’s shares changed everything.
If Tesla’s share price growth continues, Musk could net a bonus deal worth a record $55.8bn. To trigger the maximum payout he has to build Tesla into a $650bn company by 2028.
Gates, who co-founded Microsoft, was the world’s richest person for years before being knocked off the top slot by Bezos in 2017. Gates’s fortune is worth $127.7bn but would be higher had he not donated big sums to charity over the years.
He has given more than $50bn to help fight diseases and tackle poverty, mainly through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has also backed the development of Covid-19 vaccines.
The top ten richest people in the world are: Jeff Bezos $182B, Elon R Musk $128B, Bill Gates $128B, Bernard Arnault $105B, Mark Zuckerberg $102B, Warren Buffett $86.8B, Larry Page $81.3B -$323M, Sergey Brin $78.7B -$310M, Steve Ballmer $76.1B, and Mukesh Ambani $74.0B.
