American billionaire Elon Musk has surpassed Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as the world’s richest man on Thursday following as stocks of e-vehicle maker Tesla continue to skyrocket.
Musk’s total net worth soared to $195 billion, or $10 billion higher than that of Bezos with $185 billion net worth, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index as Tesla Inc.’s share prices continued its rally in 2020.
The Tesla founder’s fortune grew to $188.7 billion on Thursday and continued to grow the following day to $195 billion as Tesla’s shares climbing as much as 5.5 percent to a peak of $801 starting at the Thursday morning trading.
The reason for Musk’s huge boost in net worth is his huge shares in electronic car maker Tesla holding as much as 170.5 million shares or 18 percent of the company.
Musk, who has also been selling his properties for his plans to colonize the planet Mars through his SpaceX space exploration company, increased his earnings by as much as $13.6 billion as compared to the previous updating of the list.
Upon hearing the news Musk tweeted, “How strange” and followed it up with another tweet “Well, back to work.”
Electronic vehicle maker Tesla only recently went from reporting losses to reporting its first full year of gains with a net income of $331 million on sales of $8.77 billion in the previous quarter. Amazon, meanwhile, reported a profit in its latest quarter of $6.3 billion on revenue of $96.1 billion.
Billionaire and Microsoft founder Bill Gate is now a distant third place in the top billionaire’s list with a net worth of $134 billion.
Completing the top ten in the Billionaires Index are luxury retailer Bernard Arnault ($116 billion), Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg ($102 billion), Chinese bottled water tycoon Zhong Shanshan ($93.1 billion), Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffet ($88.2 billion), Google founders Larry Page ($83.6 billion) and Sergey Brin ($81 billion), and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison $80 billion).
All of those in the top ten except Arnault, Zhong, and Buffet is involved in Big Tech ventures and only Arnault and Zhong are the only non- Americans in the top 10 list. It is also interesting to note that almost all of those in the top ten increased their wealth except for Chinese bottled water and vaccine tycoon Zhong whose net worth dropped to $311 million.
Also worth noting in the list is the drop in net worth of several Chinese billionaires whose fortunes turned south mostly due to the ongoing trade war between the United States in China.
Among the Chinese billionaires whose fortunes dropped include Ma Huateng or Pony Ma whose company Tencent was included in a trade entity list and prohibited by US President Donald Trump from doing business with American businesses.
Alibaba founder Jack Ma who has not been seen in public ever since commenting against the Chinese financial system also dropped in net worth at $50.1 billion with a decrease of $33.6 million since the last report and $516 million this year.
Despite the ongoing trade war, Chinese billionaires that had better fortune in the list of billionaires is Chinese e-commerce operator Colin Huang of Pinduoduo at 18th place with $63.5 billion in net worth and Midea founder and air conditioner exporter He Xiangjian with a net worth of $39.1 billion at 31st place.
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