The world’s favourite tech-entrepreneur and budding astronaut has shoved Microsoft’s Bill Gates to one side to become the world’s second-richest man after shares in the car company he founded, Tesla, surged ahead. Over recent months, shares in that company have rocketed up in value, giving Elon an increase in his personal wealth from about USD7.2 billion to USD128 billion, and if you are counting, that is a lot of zeros.
According to Bloomberg, the king of the money mountain is still Jeff Bezos who, along with several other billionaires, added unimaginable amounts of money to his net worth in 2020 in spite of the coronavirus inconvenience. Amazing, really, that a man who dreamed of selling books in a digital age is now the richest alive, ever.
Elon Musk’s route to the top has seen him pegging his fortune to a number of technologies that were not exactly mainstream; in fact, you could call them boundary-pushing longshots. Tesla and Space X are the two prime examples of these longshots that are now coming home to roost.
After many years of losses, Tesla has posted profits in five consecutive quarters, which is quite an achievement with all the fuss over this pesky Wuhan Flu, but it is not really this that has propelled Tesla into the big leagues. What has created this meteoric rise is a bit irksome and it comes down to the fact that the California newcomer will be listed on the S&P 500. This means that investment funds tracking the index will automatically hold their stock. So, nothing to do with the viability of the car company itself.
This makes Tesla worth more than the likes of Volkswagen and Toyota and General Motors despite producing a fraction of the vehicles that these giants of the industry do. But wait, there is more. Musk could become the recipient of the world’s largest pay deal as well if everything goes according to plan. You see, if Musk can get the value of the company up to USD650 billion by 2028, then he will take away over USD55 billion, in accordance with a deal struck in March of 2018.
It has been an eventful few weeks for Elon Musk, what with the potential of him having Covid – or not, as the case eventually panned out – and of course his SpaceX company also launched the first of many crews to the International Space Station as well. Perhaps he is working on his second USD100 billion.
