Mumbai, India (CU)_ Elon Musk is now the wealthiest person on the planet. The outspoken billionaire and entrepreneur behind Tesla Inc. and SpaceX surpassed Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and reached the top place. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a list of the 500 richest people in the world, a 4.8 percent increase in the share price of the electric car manufacturer on Thursday promoted Musk past Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos, thereby making Musk the world’s top richest man.
The South Africa-born engineer Elon Musk was $1.5 billion ahead of Jeff Bezos at 10:15 am on Thursday and his net worth was $188.5 billion in New York. Jeff Bezos has maintained the top position since October 2017. Musk’s SpaceX and Bezos Blue Origin LLC are rival competitors, where the two tycoons challenge each other in the private space race.
At a conference hosted by the Wall Street Journal, Musk said, “If a team has been winning for too long, they do tend to get a little complacent, a little entitled, and then they don’t win the championship anymore”. He also said, “I want to be able to contribute as much as possible to the city on Mars. That means just a lot of capital.”
It took Musk a remarkable 12 months to achieve his breakthrough. His net worth expanded by more than $150 billion over the past year in probably the fastest period of wealth formation in history. His rise was fueled by an outstanding lift in the share price of Tesla, which rose 743 percent last year on the back of steady earnings, inclusion in the S&P 500 Index, and excitement from Wall Street and retail investors alike.
Musk overtook Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates Last November and became the second-richest person in the world. Also, Elon Musk and Bill Gates have occasionally engaged in verbal disagreements.
On becoming the richest person in the world, Elon Musk responded to the world in Twitter saying, “How strange. Well, back to work …”. Earlier, in a Tweet, he explained his future plans saying, “About half my money is intended to help problems on Earth & half to help establish a self-sustaining city on Mars to ensure continuation of life (of all species) in case Earth gets hit by a meteor like the dinosaurs or WW3 happens & we destroy ourselves”.
