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Tesla’s founder and CEO, Elon Musk, surpassed Amazon’s head on Thursday, Jeff Bezos, as the richest person in the world, according to the real-time list maintained by Bloomberg.
The surge in Tesla shares, which soared this year and rose more than 5% on Wall Street today, It raises Musk’s fortune to about $ 188.5 billion, according to Bloomberg calculations, which would surpass Bezos by about $ 1.5 billion.
Forbes magazine, which also has a real-time list of fortunes, for now, he still puts Musk behind the founder of Amazon, which has also seen its assets grow strongly since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
Bezos has been the richest person in the world for the past three years, according to the Forbes rankings, previously led by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates in 18 of the past 24 years.
According to Bloomberg, Bezos would still have by far the greatest fortune had it not been for his divorce, ceding about a quarter of his stake in Amazon to his ex-wife..
Musk responded to the news with two short messages via Twitter, noting “how strange” and “wow, back to work.”
The controversial businessman has seen his fortune multiply in the past year, rising more than $ 150,000 million thanks to the “rally” of Tesla stock, which appreciated 743% in 2020.
Musk, 49, owns about 20% of the electric vehicle company’s securities and about $ 42 billion in options received from the company, according to Bloomberg.
In addition, he heads the space company Space X, an area in which he also competes with Bezos, who leads Blue Origin.
Musk recently revealed that he tried to sell Tesla to Apple years ago when his company was struggling, but that his proposal – that the company would have valued the company at one-tenth of its current value – was completely rejected by the tech giant.
In addition, in December, Musk announced that he had left his hometown in the Silicon Valley, California, technology zone and moved to Texas, where his businesses are increasingly present.