Elon Musk becomes second richest person globally as he overtakes Bill Gates

Tesla co-founder Elon Musk has become the second richest person in the world overtaking the Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft.

The rise of Elon Musk’s wealth has been due to the rising share price of Tesla, which ended at $521.85 on the stock exchanges on Monday. This has taken the entrepreneur’s net worth to $127.9 billion.

According to a report by Bloomberg, Elon Musk added $100.3 billion to his net worth this year, the most of anyone on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a ranking of the world's 500 richest people. In January this year, he was ranked 35th.

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Given the rise in Tesla’s stock price, the company’s market capitalisation is fast approaching $500 billion.

A week ago, Elon Musk became the third-richest person in the world surpassing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. This news came after S&P Dow Jones Indices announced that Tesla will join its market index in December. After posting its fourth consecutive profit in the second quarter of this year, Tesla became eligible to join the S&P 500 in December.

According to Bloomberg, around three-quarters of Elon 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.

For Bill Gates, this is the second time in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index’s eight year history that he has been ranked lower than number two. He held the number one position for year before being displaced by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

According to the Fortune report, the wealth of Bill Gates would have been much higher had he not made very generous donations to various charities.

Elon Musk and Bill Gates have occasionally engaged in verbal spats. Recently, Elon Musk had ridiculed Bill Gates, saying the latter does not know about electric cars.

While responding to a question on Bill Gates's "declarations" on electric trucks, Elon Musk said, "He has no clue."

Despite the pandemic, shares of technology companies have been consistently rising resulting in increase of billionaires wealth like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, etc.