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Happy New Year, Elon Musk.
The Tesla TSLA, +7.84% and SpaceX founder passed Amazon’s AMZN, +0.65% Jeff Bezos on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index to become the richest person in the world on Thursday morning, Bloomberg reported, as a 4.8% rise in Telsa shares pushed Musk’s fortune to $188.5 billion at 10:15 a.m. Eastern, which was $1.5 billion more than Bezos’s $187 billion.
How did Musk, 49, respond to the news that he passed one of his top rivals and became the wealthiest in the world?
“How strange,” he tweeted. “Well, back to work…”
Indeed, the outspoken entrepreneur has been on quite a ride over the past year as his net worth has skyrocketed by more than $150 billion in what might be the fastest rise in wealth creation in history.
A year ago, Musk was worth about $27 billion, and barely cracked Bloomberg’s list of the 50 richest people. But Tesla saw its shares spike more than 700% last year, and the company joined the S&P 500 in December following five quarters of positive earnings.
While the pandemic took millions of livelihoods and tens of thousands of lives across the globe last year, many of the world’s wealthiest people managed to get richer. The 500 richest people in the world added a record $1.8 trillion to their combined net worth last year. And the Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies reported that the 651 U.S. billionaires saw their collective wealth grow by more than $1 trillion over nine months.
Bloomberg notes that Bezos, who had been the world’s richest person since 2017, would still hold a sizable lead over Musk if it weren’t for his divorce from MacKenzie Scott in 2019, which gave his ex-wife 25% of his Amazon stake. What’s more, Bezos also donated Amazon shares worth about $680 million in November.
