Including Thursday's gains in Tesla shares, Musk had a net worth of more than $188.5 billion, $1.5 billion more than Bezos.
Tesla Inc chief and billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk surpassed Amazon.com Inc's top boss Jeff Bezos to become the world's richest man, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday.
Including Thursday's gains in Tesla shares, Musk had a net worth of more than $188.5 billion, $1.5 billion more than Bezos, according to the report.
The 49-year-old South Africa-born engineer’s net worth was $188.5 billion at 10:15 am in New York, $1.5 billion more than Bezos, who has held the top spot since October 2017.
According to a Bloomberg report, the milestone caps an extraordinary 12 months for Musk. Over the past year, his net worth soared by more than $150 billion in possibly the fastest bout of wealth creation in history. Fueling his rise was an unprecedented rally in Tesla's share price, which surged 743% last year on the back of consistent profits, inclusion in the S&P 500 Index and enthusiasm from Wall Street and retail investors alike.
Musk's personal wealth has been boosted by last year's more than eight-fold surge in the shares of Tesla, which became the world's most valuable carmaker. He has a 20% stake in the carmaker and about $42 billion of unrealized paper gains on vested stock options, according to the Bloomberg report. Tesla shares were up as much as 7.4% on Thursday at a record high of $811.61.
The Forbes Billionaires List, however, said Musk still trails Amazon's Bezos by $7.8 billion.
Forbes has a more conservative estimate based on the Tesla stake that he has pledged as collateral for personal loans. To take that into account, it applies a 25% discount to its shareholding, according to its report in November.
Musk, who co-founded and sold Internet payments company PayPal Holdings Inc, now leads some of the most futuristic companies in the world.
Besides Tesla, he heads rocket company SpaceX and Neuralink, a startup that is developing ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect the human brain to computers.
He set up the Boring Company to make affordable tunnels below busy city streets for an all-electric public transportation system to avoid the nasty traffic jams in US cities.
Musk only just passed Bill Gates in November to become the second-richest person in the world.
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 "Elon Musk")
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