Teslas Elon Musk Overtakes Amazons Jeff Bezos as Worlds Wealthiest Person

Elon Musk has overtaken Amazon . com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos as the world’s richest person, driven by a meteoric rise in the value of Tesla Inc., the electric-car maker he runs.

The bragging rights around personal wealth pit two of the tech industry’s biggest rivals in a competition that spans from the roads to outer space. Messrs. Musk and Bezos, both founders of rocket companies, have clashed over issues such as Amazon’s power over book publishing and Mr. Musk’s interest in colonizing the planet Mars. Amazon last year bought a self-driving-car startup that would compete with Tesla.

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Mr. Musk’s net worth totaled around $195 billion Thursday, up from roughly $30 billion a year ago and topping Mr. Bezos’s wealth by about $10 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The value of Tesla’s shares rose almost 8% Thursday, enough for Mr. Musk to overtake Mr. Bezos in the wealth ranking. Amazon’s stock was up less than 1%. Mr. Bezos held the top spot for more than three years.

“How strange,” Mr. Musk tweeted Thursday about the milestone. “Well, back to work…”

Establishing the net worth of the world’s wealthiest can be tricky, in part because many of their holdings are private. Forbes, which also tracks the assets of billionaires, ranked Mr. Musk several billion dollars behind Mr. Bezos Thursday.

Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, is now the richest person in the world.

An increase in Tesla’s share price on Thursday pushed Mr. Musk past Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a ranking of the world’s 500 wealthiest people.

Mr. Musk’s net worth was $195 billion by the end of trading on Thursday, $10 billion more than that of Mr. Bezos’s. Mr. Musk’s wealth has increased by more than $150 billion over the past 12 months, thanks to a rally in Tesla’s share price, which surged 743 percent in 2020. The carmaker’s shares rose nearly 8 percent on Thursday.

“How strange,” Mr. Musk said on Twitter. “Well, back to work,” he added.

Mr. Musk, a South African-born entrepreneur, would not have been able to edge out Mr. Bezos — who has held the title of the richest person in the world since Oct. 2017 — were it not for Mr. Bezos’ philanthropy, including his donation of $680 million worth of Amazon shares in November, as well as his divorce, which caused him to relinquish about 25 percent of his stock in the e-commerce giant to MacKenzie Scott, his ex-wife.

But the rally in Tesla’s stock price was also propelled by the company’s success last year. Tesla delivered nearly 500,000 cars in 2020 as sales rose 36 percent from the year before. The company reported profits in the last four quarters, and its stock was added to the S&P 500 index.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is no longer the richest man in the world, after Tesla CEO Elon Musk's fortune on Thursday rose to $188.5 billion, $1.5 billion more than Bezos.

Shares in electric carmaker Tesla rose by more than 6 percent on Thursday to push South African-born Musk into the top spot, dethroning Bezos from the place he has occupied for more than three years, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Tesla's market capitalization, a measurement of the company's stock price multiplied by its number of shares, has been on a tear since the beginning of last year, rising from about $80 billion in January 2020 to just over $760 billion today. Musk's personal fortune, which is tied to Tesla's share price, rose by more than $150 billion last year.

The new valuation is more than eight times the combined values of the traditional "Big Three" U.S. automakers, GM, Ford and Fiat Chrysler.

In November, Musk leapfrogged past Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to become the world's second-richest man, with $128 billion at that time. Musk's massive personal fortune comes mostly from owning 20 percent of Tesla and 54 percent of his space transportation company SpaceX.