Tesla CEO Elon Musk Bumps Jeff Bezos To Become The Richest Person On Earth

While 2020 was rough for average Americans, the world’s richest only got richer, raking in more than $931 billion as the pandemic ravaged industries and livelihoods. Someone to rise out of the ashes of 2020 is Elon Musk, who is now reportedly the richest person on the planet.

According to Bloomberg, the Tesla Inc. and SpaceX CEO’s net worth has now reached some $188.5 billion, thanks in part to a 4.8% surge in Tesla’s shares. This makes Musk wealthier than the world’s previous wealthiest person, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, by $1.5 billion. Bezos would’ve held the title of World’s Richest Person Ever if not for his divorce, which saw his ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott, walk away with 25% (worth about $36 billion) of his Amazon shares. Bezos also donated some of his shares in November 2020 that totaled to about $680 million.

This comes as Tesla, which produced over 500,000 cars last year, shipped and sold just under 370,000 units in all of 2020. In spite of this, Tesla shares have surged 743% last year.

In light of his astronomical earnings and prior to this announcement, Musk did an interview with Business Insider last month to discuss his lack of interest in material possessions, as well as divulge the purpose of all of his wealth–which is to get humanity to build a city on Mars.

“I think it is important for humanity to become a spacefaring civilization and a multiplanet species,” Musk said. “And it’s going to take a lot of resources to build a city on Mars. I want to be able to contribute as much as possible to the city on Mars. That means just a lot of capital.”

Musk has been in hot water in recent years for many of his controversial remarks. The CEO took to Twitter to mock gender pronouns last month, which caught the attention of an LGBTQIA+ advocacy group that originally labeled Tesla as a great place for the marginalized to work at. He’s also commented on and downplayed the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and refused to credit Neir: Automata fan art, which temporarily forced him off Twitter in June 2019.