Elon Musk becomes world's richest person; overtakes Amazon's Bezos
Tesla Inc.'s Chief Elon Musk has surpassed Amazon.com Inc’s Jeff Bezos to become the world’s richest man.
According to the reports, including Thursday's gains in Tesla shares, Musk had a net worth of more than $188.5 billion, $1.5 billion more than Bezos.
Musk’s personal wealth has been boosted by last year’s more than eight-fold surge in the shares of Tesla, which became the world’s most valuable carmaker.
Reports state that he has a 20% stake in the carmaker and about $42 billion of unrealized paper gains on vested stock options.
Tesla shares were up as much as 7.4% on Thursday at a record high of $811.61.
Musk, who co-founded and sold Internet payments company PayPal Holdings Inc, now leads some of the most futuristic companies in the world.
Besides Tesla, he heads rocket company SpaceX and Neuralink, a startup that is developing ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect the human brain to computers.