Elon Musk Overtakes Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Becomes The World’s Richest Person

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, is now the richest man in the world as his current net worth of over $185 billion has just exceeded Jeff Bezos’ $184 billion.

Bezos, who had the distinction of being the richest person since 2017, has succumbed to Musk’s rapid wealth increase over the past year. That rise is the fastest to the #1 spot in history, and it makes for a significant bounce back for Musk, who, less than two years ago, whose company was making news for being on the verge of bankruptcy.

Read More: Tesla Came Oh So Close To Delivering 500,000 Vehicles In 2020

In July, Musk passed Warren Buffett in July to become the seventh-richest person in the world, and then passed Bill Gates in November to become the world’s second-richest person. As wild as it sounds, Musk amassed more wealth in the past year than the whole of Bill Gates’ $132 billion net worth to date.

Aside from his exploits at Tesla, Musk is also the founder, CEO, CTO and chief designer of SpaceX, founder of The Boring Company, co-founder of Neuralink, and co-founder and initial co-chairman of OpenAI.

He started the year with a net worth of “only” about $27 billion, which is by no means bad, but that barely put him in the top 50 of the world’s richest people. However, he was able to add more than $150 billion to that number due in part to Tesla’s share price increasing approximately 700 percent over the past year, and is now the richest person on the planet.

Watch: Elon Musk Wanted Apple To Buy Tesla At $60 Billion Valuation, Tim Cook Wouldn’t Even Take Meeting

Yesterday morning, Musk pinned an older tweet of his to the top of his Twitter feed, likely to share with the public his thoughts on spending his wealth. The tweet reads “About half my money is intended to help problems on Earth, and half to help establish a self-sustaining city on Mars to ensure continuation of life (of all species) in case Earth gets hit by a meteor like the dinosaurs or WW3 happens and we destroy ourselves.”

Pretty lofty aspirations indeed. Will he go through with them? Guess we’ll have to wait and see.