Elon Musk becomes the richest person in the world

Elon Musk, the founder of the U.S.-based electronic vehicle maker Tesla, has become the world’s richest person. He took the top spot from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who had held it since 2017, thanks to the soaring stock prices of Tesla. “How strange. Well, back to work...." he tweeted plainly.

Bloomberg announced that Musk has become the world’s richest person on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index at 10:15 a.m. on Thursday (local time). As Tesla’s stock went up 7.94% in Nasdaq on Thursday alone, the net worth of its founder who owns 18% of the company recorded 188.5 billion dollars, which is 1.5 billion dollars higher than Bezos’.

Tesla’s market capitalization rose to 773.5 billion dollars, which is the fifth largest in the U.S., taking over Facebook’s spot. Four companies bigger than Tesla are Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google’s parents company Alphabet.

Until the beginning of the last year, Musk was in 35th place with 27 billion dollars of net worth. As Tesla’s stock prices soared last year thanks to the boom of the electronic vehicle industry, Musk became the second richest person in the world at the end of November last year, taking over Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates. In just 1.5 months later, he went on to take first place. “Over the past year the South Africa-born engineer has added more than $165 billion to his fortune in what's probably the fastest bout of wealth creation in history,” said Bloomberg.

As the next U.S. administration led by President-elect Joe Biden to be launched on January 20 announced that environment-friendly policies will be introduced, Tesla’s stock prices are likely to go up for a while. In particular, the Democratic Party will have a majority in the administration, the House of Representatives, and the Senate thanks to its win against the Republican Party at the Georgia Senate race on Wednesday, which will accelerate Bidens’ environment-friendly policies.


Seol Lee snow@donga.com