Musk becomes third richest man in the world

The stock market rally centering around large tech stocks over the past few months is inflating assets of the richest people in the world. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has become the third richest person in the world on Monday (local time) thanks to Tesla’s meteoric surge.

According to Bloomberg, Musk’s net worth was 115 billion dollars as of Monday, which is the third-largest in the world and surpasses Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg who has 111 billion dollars. The richest man on earth is Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos with 202 billion dollars and the second richest person is founder of Microsoft Bill Gates with 125 billion dollars.

Musk’s net worth was 27 billion dollars early this year, but it has more than quadrupled in eight months. Tesla’s stock price soared more than five times this year, and it once again spiked by more than 12 percent on the day of the 5-for-1 stock split from the day before. The split divided one share into five, which could attract new retail investors who hesitated to buy Tesla due to the high stock price.

Bezos saw an increase in his net worth by 87.6 billion dollars because of the overall rally of the U.S. stocks. Gates and Zuckerberg also enjoyed an increase in their wealth by 11.7 billion and 32.4 billion dollars, respectively. Combined amount of increase in the wealth of those four in this year is as much as 219.5 billion dollar.


Jae-Dong Yu jarrett@donga.com