Elon Musk close to surpassing Amazon's Jeff Bezos as world's richest person

Tesla Inc. and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is close to surpassing business rival Amazon's founder Jeff Bezos as the ‘world’s richest person’, trailing by only US $3 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index ranking. This comes as Musk’s electric carmaker Tesla’s share prices gained 4.9 per cent this week, with an overall 60 per cent surge since mid-November hitting a record high. Musk, earlier this year, had overtaken Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to become the world’s second-richest person after a sizeable increase of $100 billion with raid ascend of Tesla’s share prices and his space agency SpaceX’s success. 

Bezos, the CEO of Blue Origin LLC and Amazon currently holds the top ranking in the world’s 500 wealthiest people list with a net worth of $182 billion. According to NPR, Bezos' wealth is large than the GDP of most countries and the market cap of many companies that are on the S&P 500. According to data from the International Monetary Fund, Bezos’ net worth surpasses the GDP of Hungary and Ukraine. However, with  Tesla’s soaring stock prices, the South African-born entrepreneur Musk gained a personal wealth of $147 billion, just some hundreds billion dollars short to overtake the place of the centibillionaire Bezos. 

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[Credit: Bloomberg market index.]

Tesla's share surged by 743 percent

Musk’s wealth in 2019 jumped a decent share of $150 billion due to the unprecedented rally in Tesla’s share cost that surged by an estimated 743 per cent towards the final year as per the S&P 500 Index. Just last month, Tesla’s manufacturing boosted the constant earnings for the firm, leaving behind Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Co-leading to about $40 billion on paper gain for SpaceX CEO. Meanwhile, according to Forbes and Bloomberg billionaires list, Jeff Bezos’ net worth increased by $5.3 billion last year in August as Amazon's stock price surged by nearly 3 per cent despite pandemic. Bezos' wealth had surged by $80 billion as he overtook Facebook CEO and Forbes’ then third-richest person Mark Zuckerburg. 

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