Elon Musk to beat Jeff Bezos and TikTok owner to huge milestone

The world’s richest man Elon Musk chooses to live “below the poverty line” according to his ex, yet he’s set to smash another milestone.

Elon Musk’s on-off girlfriend has already revealed that he does not live a billionaire’s life, yet he’s predicted to be the first person on the planet who will reach an eye-watering milestone – a personal value of one trillion dollars.

Analysis of the world’s wealthiest people’s annual net worth has revealed that Mr Musk could reach trillionaire status as soon as 2024, according to software company Tipalti Approve.

The Tesla and SpaceX founder, 50, is currently still top of the world’s richest charts, with a net worth of $US266 billion ($A355 billion) at the time of writing as per the Forbes Billionaire Index.

Surprisingly though, the vast majority of his fortune won’t come from his electric car company.

Elon Musk is predicted to become the world’s first trillionaire – yet still chooses to live below the poverty line at times. Picture: Christian Marquardt – Pool/Getty Images

Instead, it was predicted that his space exploration business SpaceX, which was founded in 2002, would be the money-maker.

“Since 2017, Musk’s fortune has shown an annual average increase of 129 per cent, which could potentially see him enter the trillion-dollar club in just two short years, achieving a net worth of $US1.38 trillion by 2024 at age 52,” the Tipalti Approve report found.

“SpaceX generates massive incomes by charging governmental and commercial clients to send various things into space, including satellites, ISS [International Space Station] supplies, and people.”

Analysts from investment bank Morgan Stanley also forecast his trillionaire status

as they said SpaceX was challenging any preconceived notion of what was possible in space.

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk and the musician Grimes, who revealed the eccentric entrepreneur lives below the poverty line at times. Picture: Angela Weiss/AFP

Meanwhile, TikTok founder Zhang Yiming, 38, is projected to reach trillionaire status by 2026, which would make set him as the youngest person to reach the milestone – he will then be aged 42.

However, the report also warned that the wealth landmark is hard to predict as wealth can rise and drop rapidly, noting that Zhong Shanshan, chairman of Chinese bottle water company Nongfu Spring, went from a net worth of $US2 billion ($A2.7 billion) in 2020 to $US71 billion ($A95 billion) just two years later after public offerings for two of his companies.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos lags behind other rich-listers. Picture: Emma McIntyre/Getty Images

In 2017, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was the first to reach $US100 billion since Bill Gates back in 1999, the report found. But Mr Musk has since muscled him out of the race to trillionaire status.

“It was Bezos, not Musk, who a few years ago was expected to become the world’s first trillionaire, and who now isn’t expected to join the club until 2030, some six years after Musk,” the report said.

Despite Mr Musk’s wealth, he “lives at times below the poverty line”.

That’s according to his on-and-off girlfriend, musician Grimes, who made the bombshell claim in a bizarre interview with Vanity Fair.