Elon Musk continues his meteoric rise up the charts of the world’s richest people. The Tesla and SpaceX head just passed long-time “richest guy in the world” stand-in Bill Gates for the second overall spot, with a net worth of $128 billion.
The new valuation comes as Musk’s personal fortune grew $7.2 billion in a single day on Monday, with the markets still responding to the news that Tesla stock would trade on the S&P 500. The enthusiastic purchasing of the stock ballooned Musk’s wealth due to the significant amount of shares the co-founder holds in his electric car company. That pushed him just past Gates, who holds a $127.7 billion fortune that’s significantly smaller than it could be due to Gates’ well-publicized philanthropy.
Musk became the third-richest man just a few short months ago, riding a Tesla stock split that increased the overall number of shares in circulation (and a great year for the world’s richest people in general) to pass Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Overall in 2020, Musk has had the best year among billionaires. His net worth has increased by over $100 billion in 2020, pushing him from just inside the top 40 richest people on Earth to his current spot looking up at Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.
Musk still has quite a climb in front of him if he wants to knock the Amazon founder out of the slot he’s held since 2017. Bezos recently became the first person ever with a net worth over $200 billion. The gap between Musk and Bezos is of a similar size of the one between a person with no money and Warren Buffett, the Berkshire Hathaway head worth over $70 billion.
The pandemic year has boosted the economic inequality that characterizes our current age, with the world’s richest seeing massive gains while significant portions of the country’s labor force became unemployed. A report from Swedish bank UBS found the billionaire class saw their overall wealth rise by more than 25 percent between April and July of this year.
