Elon Musk’s net worth has passed $230 billion, making him the world’s richest man after SpaceX stock climbed 33%.
The Tesla CEO has already outstripped former richest person, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and is now wealthier than Bill Gates and Warren Buffett combined, despite only making Forbes’ top ten billionaire list in the middle of last year.
After a $100 billion secondary offering of SpaceX shares on October 8, the Tesla founder watched his and his company’s wealth soar.
Multiple persons familiar with the matter told CNBC that the firm has reached an agreement with both new and existing investors to sell up to $755 million in SpaceX stock from insiders for $560 per share.
After initially offering the transaction to investors in February, when SpaceX’s valuation was at $74 billion at 419.19 a share, the company’s new share price has increased by 33 percent, bringing the company’s valuation to $100.3 billion.
According to the publication, the initial round of offers raised roughly $1.2 billion.
With its new boosted valuation, the company joins the elite group of private ‘centicorns’ or ‘hectocorns,’ or corporations valued at more than $100 billion.
Forbes Real-Time Top Ten Billionaires List
Jeff Bezos -$197 billion
Bernard Arnault and family – $185 billion
Bill Gates – $132 billion
Mark Zuckerberg – $116 billion
Larry Ellison – $125 billion
Larry Page – $120.9 billion
Sergey Brin – $116.2 billion
Warren Buffett – $103.1 billion
Mukesh Ambani – $102.2 billion
According to Forbes Real-Time Billionaires List as of October 17, 2021
According to CB Insights, SpaceX is now the world’s second-most valuable private firm, trailing only China’s Bytedance.
That’s a big cry from just over a year ago, when Musk didn’t even make Forbes’ top ten billionaires list, which was dominated by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who topped the list with a net worth of $113 billion at the time.
After Blue Origin and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos posted some encouraging remarks about his company, the SpaceX creator was eager to boast about taking the number one spot on the rich list, tweeting a second place medal to Bezos.
After the pandemic and lockdowns, Bezos had previously held the title of world’s richest person, with a net worth of $197.8 billion as of 2021.
Musk announced in April that he will give away $150 million, including a $100 million prize in a carbon removal competition, in which the billionaire challenged competitors to come up with practical methods for lowering CO2 emissions at scale in a “durable and sustainable” manner.
The tournament began on Earth Day and will last four years, ending on April 22, 2025, which is Earth Day 2025.
Musk’s net worth has climbed by about $60 billion since he began the competition in April, according to Bloomberg, with the SpaceX transaction alone adding $11 billion to Musk’s net worth.
In the early 2000s, the 50-year-old co-founded PayPal before going on to build SpaceX and Tesla Motors.
Musk’s personal wealth has risen as a result of the rising values of Tesla and SpaceX, with the latter raising billions to support two capital-intensive projects, Starlink and Starship.
Starlink is a SpaceX-operated satellite broadband constellation that provides satellite Internet connectivity to the majority of the planet, whereas Starship is a totally reusable launch system currently in development.
To date, SpaceX has launched 1,740 Starlink satellites, which are currently providing an internet network to over 100,000 people in 14 countries who are enrolled in the project’s public beta for $99 per month.
