Elon Musk passes Jeff Bezos to become world’s richest person
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For the first time in three years, there’s a new person sitting on the throne of the world’s richest man.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk beat out his space rival Amazon founder Jeff Bezos for the crown on Thursday as the electric-car maker’s stock price continued its staggering rally.
Both men are competing in space with Bezos at the head of rocket maker Blue Origin and Musk at the head of rocket company Space X.
Musk’s fortune grew to $187.4 billion with Tesla’s shares climbing as much as 4.5 percent to a peak of $792.10 in early trading, according to The Post’s calculations.
That put him slightly ahead of Bezos, whose net worth rose to nearly $186.8 billion with Amazon shares jumping as much as 1.6 percent to $3,189.06 apiece.
Snatching the top spot from Bezos marked another major milestone in Musk’s meteoric rise.
The South African-born entrepreneur started 2020 with a less than $30 billion fortune that grew more than fivefold as Tesla’s stock price exploded by more than 700 percent.
Musk, 49, already owns about 20 percent of Tesla, and he could get even richer after unlocking multiple stock awards from his eye-popping $50 billion pay package which was approved in early 2018.
Bezos, 56, has been the world’s richest man since he claimed the title from Microsoft tycoon Bill Gates in October 2017, according to Bloomberg. Musk took the No. 2 spot from Gates in November.
Last year was also good for Bezos, who added $75 billion to his fortune as the coronavirus pandemic drove up demand for online shopping and led Amazon to record profits.
Bezos has sold off chunks of his Amazon stake in recent years to fund Blue Origin, his space-exploration startup that accounts for about $7.2 billion of his net worth, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index.
Blue Origin is a rival to Musk’s rocket-building company, SpaceX, which reportedly makes up nearly $19 billion of his fortune.
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