The founder of Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk, became the richest man in the world, beating Amazon owner Jeff Bezos. As of 10:15 am New York time, Musk’s fortune rose to $ 188.5 billion thanks to the rise in Tesla shares. Thanks to this, he bypassed Jeff Bezos, who has been the richest man in the world since October 2017.
As the newspaper notes, over the past year, Musk’s fortune has grown by $ 150 billion, primarily due to the rapid rise in the price of shares in the electric car manufacturer Tesla – by 743%. Bloomberg suggests this is the fastest getting rich in history.
Along with this, Bezos lost part of his Amazon shares after the divorce, and as part of the charity, he donated shares worth about $ 680 million. Musk himself has already commented on his leadership on Twitter. He wrote: “So strange.” And then he added: “Well, back to work …”. In total, according to Bloomberg, last year the fortunes of the 500 most affluent people in the world grew by a record $ 1.8 trillion, or 31%.
Musk himself has repeatedly stated that he has little interest in material things, and apart from Tesla and SpaceX shares, he has almost no other assets. The 49-year-old engineer, born in South Africa, calls his main dream and the purpose of his assets to transform humanity into a space civilization.
“I want to be able to contribute to the creation of a city on Mars,” he said in an interview last month.
Update: We note that the share price is constantly changing, so after a while, Bezos regained his first position on Bloomberg’s list of billionaires, which is updated in real-time. Despite this, however, in two years, only Musk was able to move the head of Amazon from the first place. At the time of the update, the difference between them was $ 3 billion – 184 and 181 billion.
It’s not about the money
This is a key point in Musk’s vision of doing business. During an interview in 2014, he admitted to the BBC that he did not know the size of his fortune. “It’s not a bag of money,” he said. “It’s just that I have certain shares in Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity, and the market estimates their value.”
He has nothing against the pursuit of wealth if it is “ethical and decent”, but claims to be driven by something else. And this approach pays off. The fortune of Musk, who was the prototype of Iron Man (Tony Stark) in the films of the same name, was estimated at $ 10 billion when we spoke in 2014. Now it has exceeded 185 billion.
Particularly good is the performance of the Tesla electric vehicle manufacturer. In 2020, its shares have risen in price by 700%, and the capitalization exceeded 600 billion dollars. For this money, you can buy such car companies as Ford, General Motors, BMW, Volkswagen, and Fiat Chrysler – and remain at Ferrari.
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That same base on Mars explains a lot of what Musk sees as the key to success. “I want everything to be better in the future,” he told the BBC. “I want to see new and exciting things that will make our life better.”
Take SpaceX, for example. Musk told us that he created this company because he was frustrated by the insufficient scale of the American space program.
“I continued to expect that we would go beyond the Earth, send a man to Mars, and create a lunar base. And flights to orbit will become more frequent,” said the businessman
This did not happen, and then Musk came up with the idea of the “Mission of the Martian Oasis”, the task of which was to send a small greenhouse to Mars. He hoped the project would help revive interest in space exploration and convince the US government to increase funding for NASA.
While Musk was trying to implement his idea, he realized that the main problem is “not a lack of desire, but a lack of ways.” It turned out that space technologies are much more expensive than they could. And voila! The business of creating the world’s cheapest space rockets was born.
And that’s what is most important here: it was based not on the intention to make money, but on the desire to send a person to Mars.
Musk told the BBC that he considers himself more of an engineer than an investor. He admits that his main motivation for his work is his passion for solving technical problems. And it is this, and not the number of dollars in the bank, that is the measure of success for him. He knows that whatever hurdles his companies have to overcome are helping everyone else in the industry solve the same problems. And it always works.
That is why, shortly before our meeting, Musk announced that he was opening up Tesla’s patents for general use – in this way he hoped to accelerate the development of electric vehicles around the world.
