Elon Musk becomes first person in world to reach historic net worth of $500B
Elon Musk has broken new ground when it comes to his incomprehensible wealth, as he has now become the first person in history to reach a historic net worth of over $500,000,000,000.
It was only a couple of weeks ago that Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison briefly overtook Elon Musk on the world's richest list in a shocking move, yet not only has the latter reclaimed the top spot he held for so long prior to the shuffle but he has also broken a new historic milestone.
It's safe to say that Elon Musk has been rich for a very long time, as his successes in the early 2000s with Zip2 helped him catapult himself to supreme wealth once he took over Tesla, started SpaceX, and became one of the leading individuals in the AI world.
While he was comfortably a billionaire in the 2010s, it wasn't until the pandemic that his net worth started to really grow, as he increased his fortunes by over six times in just a single year between 2020 and 2021.
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That figure still pales in comparison to his current net worth though, as Forbes has revealed on Wednesday that Elon Musk has broken records by becoming the very first person to ever surpass a total net worth of $500 billion.
It occurred at around 3:30 p.m. EST on the website's real-time billionaires tracker, and just 10 months after he became the first ever to break the $400 billion glass ceiling last December following Donald Trump's election success.
While it has predictably dipped slightly since achieving the feat – sitting right now at around $499.1 billion – it's still considerably higher than any of his peers.
Musk is roughly $150 billion richer than the aforementioned Ellison in second place, and has more money than Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos combined, who sit in third and four place respectively.
Strong ownership stakes in his two main companies are what have catapulted the tech mogul towards this eye-watering $500 billion figure, as Musk's 12% stake in Tesla alone is worth $191 billion, with an additional $168 billion coming from his estimated 42% stake in SpaceX, which is a private company worth roughly $400 billion.
If Musk continues as the pace that he has achieved since the start of the decade he'll become the world's first ever trillionaire by 2033, with the prospective $1 trillion pay package from Tesla playing a significant role in this too.