Finally, it’s official. Jeff Bezos is not the richest man on the planet. The man who has surpassed him is none other than Elon Musk.
Elon Musk is a 49-year-old engineer born in South Africa whose total worth was estimated to be $188.5 billion, reported by Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Since late 2017, Jeff Bezos had held the spot of the world’s richest man, but the net worth of Elon Musk finally exceeded Jeff Bezos’ by $1.5 billion.
Both men own lucrative private businesses. Musk is the chief executive of SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies Corporation), whereas Jeff Bezos is the chieftain of Blue Origin LLC. These giant corporations compete with each other for contracts from governments and investors.
o
Elon Musk is also the CEO and co-founder of Tesla. Though the value of SpaceX is estimated to be $49 billion, the majority of Musk’s total income comes from Tesla.
The shares of Amazon, owned by Jeff Bezos, declined by 1.7% while the shares of Tesla have increased by 4.7%. 2020 was a good year for Tesla as its precipitous run led to an approximately 700% rise in the company’s value and its shares are still growing in 2021. Right now, the market cap of Tesla is approximately $750 billion, as compared to Amazon, which has a market cap of $1.6 trillion. Tesla is also working to woo investors to accumulate funds for launching Tesla’s Internet satellite and rocket business.
Market analysts believe that Jeff Bezos would not have lost his status as the richest man in the world if he had not divorced his wife. Because of the divorce, he had to concede 1/4th of his shares in Amazon to Mackenzie Scott, his ex-wife. Bezos also donated $680 million for different philanthropic purposes.
Despite tremendous gains, Elon Musk is not considered materialistic and owns only limited assets other than SpaceX and Tesla. In a recent interview with Axel Springer, Musk had said that his actual objective is to accelerate the evolution of humanity into spacefaring advancement.
In October 2018, Elon Musk also tweeted that half of all his money will be spent on solving different Earth-related problems, and the rest will be used for developing a self-sustainable city on Mars.
