Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk has gotten a lot richer in recent months.
The 49-year-old entrepreneur’s net worth rose $7.2 billion U.S. this year to $127.9 billion U.S., driven by yet another surge in Tesla’s share price. Musk has added $100.3 billion U.S. to his net worth in 2020, the most of anyone on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a ranking of the world’s 500 richest people.
In January of this year, Musk was ranked as the 35th richest person in the world. He has now surpassed Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) co-founder Bill Gates to become the world’s second-richest person.
Musk’s climbing of the wealth ranks has been driven largely by Tesla, whose market value is approaching $500 billion U.S. About three-quarters of his net worth is comprised of Tesla shares, which are valued more than four times as much as his stake in Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX.
Bill Gates has never ranked lower than number two on the Billionaires Index. He held the top spot for years before being bumped by Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos in 2017. Gates’s net worth of $127.7 billion U.S. would be much higher had he not donated so prodigiously to charity over the years. He has given more than $27 billion U.S. to his charitable foundation since 2006.
With Monday’s move, Musk unseats an occasional verbal sparring partner in Gates, who the Tesla billionaire has ridiculed on Twitter for, among other things, having "no clue" about electric trucks. The two have also traded barbs over Covid-19. Gates, whose charitable foundation is one of the preeminent bodies backing vaccine research, has expressed concern over Musk’s stated suspicion of pandemic data and embrace of various conspiracy theories.
The year has been a lucrative one for the world’s richest people. Despite the global pandemic and widespread layoffs that have disproportionately affected the world’s working class and poor, the members of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index have collectively gained 23% in net worth, or $1.3 trillion U.S., since the start of 2020.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos remains the richest person in the world with a net worth in excess of $200 billion, according to Bloomberg.
