KATHMANDU: Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has overtaken Bill Gates to become the second-richest person in the world just weeks after he passed Mark Zuckerberg to become the third-richest.
It means only Amazon founder Jeff Bezos lies now ahead of him in the rankings. In January he ranked 35th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Musks’ wealth soared after his electric car company Tesla was selected to join the S&P 500.
Tesla will enter the S&P 500, a stock market index that measures the performance of 500 large companies listed on the US stock exchange, on December 21 after it failed to make the cut back in September.
The 49-year-old’s net worth soared $7.2 billion to $127.9 billion, driven by a surge in Tesla’s share price, according to Bloomberg. The South African-born billionaire owns a 20 per cent stake in Tesla, which has seen its share price rise more than five-fold so far this year.
This year has been a wildly successful year for Musk – who saw his rocket company SpaceX send four astronauts into space earlier this month, fulfilling its first commercial contract with the US space agency Nasa.
This year alone the Musk has seen his fortune grow by $100.3 billion. About three-quarters of Musk’s net worth is comprised of Tesla shares, which are valued more than four times as much as his stake in Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX.
As it stands, Tesla is already the most valuable car maker in the world, despite making a fraction of the number of vehicles that are churned out by more established manufacturers such as General Motors, Volkswagen, Ford and Toyota.
Tesla is now valued at more than Disney, Toyota and Coca-Cola and has a market cap of almost $500billion. To be eligible to join the S&P 500 a company must be based in the US, have a market capitalization of at least $8.2billion, be liquid and at least half of its shares must be available to the public, according to CNN. Companies must also report four straight quarters of profit.
Tesla reported its fifth consecutive quarter of profit with third-quarter revenue of $8.77billion.
Musk’s position at number two means Bill Gates is pushed into third for only the second time in eight years. Gates was bumped off the top spot which he had held for years, by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos in 2017. Gates’s net worth of $127.7 billion would be far higher were he not to have donated so much to charity over the years.
-Daily Mail