Elon Musk is now the world’s richest person. The Tesla and SpaceX entrepreneur officially surpassed Amazon’s Jeff Bezos for title of “World’s Wealthiest” on Thursday, thanks to a 4.8% bump in Tesla’s stock share price, which puts Musk ahead of Bezos on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Musk’s current value is measured at $188.5 billion – $1.5 billion more than Jeff Bezos can claim. Bezos had been the world’s wealthiest person for a long stretch, going all the way back to October of 2017. Musk and Bezos businessmen aren’t just competing for big-money rankings; as the owners of SpaceX and Blue Origin LLC. (respectively), Musk and Bezos are currently direct competitors.
Despite having a somewhat turbulent year in 2020 with “controversies” over public statements and such, Elon Musk also had a milestone year, financially. Tesla’s stock price shot up 743% in 2020, making it the most profitable car company in the world. Confidence from Wall Street, analysts, and investors helped propel that success.
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Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos saw some unprecedented boosts in Amazon’s profits due to the COVID-19 pandemic forcing online shopping to become the norm for 2020. However, Bezos also saw unprecedented losses in 2020, due to his divorce from his wife MacKenzie Scott. That divorce cost Bezos about a quarter of his stake in Amazon; he also donated $680 million to charity in an effort to help with the pandemic and its various economic costs.
Of course, all of this talk probably seems ridiculous in the contest of 2021, where so many people around the world are struggling to keep themselves from toppling over an economic cliff. It highlights the very real exacerbation a lot of people feel over an economic system that keeps rewarding the top-tier wealthiest people with even more wealth. In 2020, the billionaire class added half a trillion dollars to their collective net worth during the COVID-19 pandemic, while America saw an unprecedented 40 million citizens file for unemployment in that same time span.
Putting aside the question of the economy, Elon Musk is poised for more big things in 2021. Tesla continues to make big sales, with its Cybertruck poised to be the next big automotive trend. SpaceX completed a historic mission to the International Space Station; the company has also partnered with Tom Cruise to film a movie in upper orbit.
