New York: Tesla chief Elon Musk on Thursday overtook Amazon boss Jeff Bezos to become the world’s richest man, some media reports said.
Must, 49, has a net worth of more than $188.5 billion, $1.5 billion more than Bezos, when Thursday’s gains in Tesla shares are included, media reports said.
Musk’s personal wealth swelled on an eight-fold surge in the shares of the world’s most valuable carmaker Tesla last year.
Musk has a 20% stake in Tesla, which were up 7.4% on Thursday at a record $811.61, apart from $42 billion of unrealized gains in vested stock options, a Bloomberg report said.
Musk, however, still trails Bezos by $7.8 billion, according to the Forbes Billionaires List.
Forbes has a conservative estimate based on the stake Musk has pledged as collateral for own loans.
Forbes November report has applied a 25% discount to his shareholding on account of the collateral stake.
Musk co-founded and sold Internet payments company PayPal Holdings and now leads, apart from Tesla, rocket firm SpaceX and Neuralink, which is building ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect brains and computers.
He established the Boring Company to make tunnels below busy city streets for an all-electric public transportation system in the US.
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