Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks to the press at the car factory Tesla is building in Germany in September.ODD ANDERSEN / AFP
The businessman Elon Musk has become the richest person in the world this Thursday after overtaking the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, in the Bloomberg Billionaires ranking.
The South African-born engineer's fortune rises to $ 188.5 billion (about € 153.6 billion) after electric car maker Tesla, of which Musk is CEO, soared its shares by more than 6%.
According to Bloomberg,
the firm's stock market
rally
has increased the businessman's assets to exceed the fortune of Bezos by $ 1.5 billion.
"How strange," Elon Musk responded on Twitter to a user who quoted him commenting on the news.
"Well, let's get back to work ...", he added.
Well, back to work ...
- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 7, 2021
Elon Musk is also the executive director of SpaceX, the first private company to send astronauts to the International Space Station, and until this Wednesday his assets stood, according to the Bloomberg index, at 181,000 million dollars, below 184,000 million by Jeff Bezos.
Third and a long way behind is Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, whose fortune amounts to 132,000 million dollars.
The feat of the South African engineer is doubly surprising given the amount of capital he has managed to accumulate and the speed with which he has done so.
In 2020, it increased its net worth by 150 billion in what Bloomberg calls “possibly the fastest wealth creation in history”, thanks to the growth of Tesla's share price of 743%.
In addition to his heritage, Musk's history has historically been linked to the electric car manufacturer, which he founded in 2003 and of which he still owns 20% of the shares.
The tremendous growth in Tesla's market value over the past year made the company the world's most valuable carmaker after surpassing $ 200 billion in capitalization and unseating Toyota.
Six months later, Tesla's valuation is close to $ 760 billion.
Despite the poor performance of the motor sector in 2020, the US company has managed to break the pandemic and sell half a million cars compared to 367,000 in 2019, while the two largest manufacturers in the world, Volkswagen and Toyota, reduced their sales between January and November 16.5% and 12.5%.
Still, Tesla's market share remains negligible.
Both the German and Japanese manufacturers exceeded seven million units sold in the first 11 months of 2020.
The rise in the trading floors allowed Musk's firm to enter the S & P500, the main US stock index, at the end of December, where it ranks as the fifth most valued company after the tech giants Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook.
In addition to Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk co-founded and sold the Internet payments company Paypal and runs Neuralink, a company that aims to connect the brain with a computer by implanting a chip in the head.
