Elon Musk has extended his lead as the world’s richest person as Tesla’s value rocketed above $1trillion (£726bn).
The tech tycoon was worth around £210bn last night following a dramatic surge in the carmaker’s share price.
The 50-year-old is well ahead of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who has a £140bn fortune, and LVMH tycoon Bernard Arnault, who is third with around £118bn.
Elon Musk has extended his lead as the world’s richest person as Tesla’s value rocketed above $1trillion (£726bn)
Tesla became the first carmaker with a value of $1trillion this week after rental company Hertz ordered 100,000 Model 3s – its biggest deal yet. This made Tesla more valuable that the ten other largest global carmakers.
At the same time, Musk’s wealth now eclipses the value of the UK’s five largest banks – HSBC, Lloyds, Barclays, Natwest and Standard Chartered.
Musk owns 17 percent of the transport group’s shares. The shares soared 740pc in 2019, as tech companies took Wall Street indexes to storm and sent Nasdaq spiralling at record highs.
Musk celebrated the watershed $1trillion moment by tweeting: ‘Wild $T1mes!’ But the father of seven is a controversial businessman whose tweets have fallen foul of US regulators, who have previously accused him of manipulating the stock market with posts on the social media site saying that he was considering taking the company private.
He has also become a key advocate of cryptocurrencies – frequently plugging bitcoin and dogecoin in particular. He made a statement on Twitter earlier this week that he had no holdings in Shiba Inu (a fast-growing cryptocurrency). Shortly after, the value of Shiba Inu plunged 15 percent.
Musk is well ahead of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who has a £140bn fortune, and LVMH tycoon Bernard Arnault, who is third with around £118bn
After dropping out of a Stanford University post-graduate program, the South African-born entrepreneur founded Paypal. Paypal was snapped up by Ebay for £1.2bn in 2002. He didn’t create Tesla, but he was one its earliest investors. He became its chairman in 2004. In 2012, he was first to be included on the Forbes list as a billionaire. For years analysts were sceptical about Tesla’s prospects as it ran into frequent production delays and stints of quarterly losses.
Last week the group posted record quarterly profits of £1.2bn. It sold 240,000 vehicles between July-September. Musk believes humans should be an interplanetary species. He has entered into an informal space race alongside Bezos. Musk recently separated from his partner of three years, the singer Grimes, with whom he has one child, named X Æ A-12.