Tesla’s Elon Musk becomes world’s richest person

Tesla’s rocketing share price has sent CEO Elon Musk racing past Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to become the world’s richest person.

Tesla chief executive Elon Musk has raced past Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to become the world’s richest person, worth an estimated $US195bn ($251bn), with his wealth fuelled by his electric car company’s meteoric rise over the past year.

Mr Musk owns about 20 per cent of Tesla, whose shares skyrocketed eight-fold in 2020.

They hit a new high on Friday, climbing 7.9 per cent during Wall Street’s session and another 2 per cent in after hours trading, briefly overtaking Facebook and giving it a valuation of $US769bn.

The surge makes Mr Musk the world’s richest person, worth about eight times the entire annual GDP of Iceland.

He’s now worth $US10bn more than Mr Bezos, who he’s taking on in a high-stakes space race.

Mr Bezos had been the world’s richest person since 2017, but gave a quarter of his family’s Amazon stake to ex-wife MacKenzie Scott in divorce proceedings in 2019.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Picture: AFP

The Tesla executive’s rise leaves Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates in distant third place, with a net worth of about $US134bn, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index.

It lists Atlassian co-founders Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes as the world’s 149th and 150th richest people, respectively.

Mr Musk, who founded SpaceX, The Boring Company, and Neuralink – which is making brain implants to treat neurological issues – tweeted “How strange” about his latest title, before adding “Well, back to work …”

How strange

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 7, 2021

Well, back to work …

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 7, 2021

The South Africa-born executive, who moved to Texas last year, said in a pinned tweet on his Twitter page that his wealth was “intended to help problems on Earth & half to help establish a self-sustaining city on Mars to ensure continuation of life.”

SpaceX is due to test its latest Starship prototype as early as this weekend. Starship is designed to take people and payloads to the moon.

Meanwhile Tesla, now the world’s most valuable car maker, last week reported that it fell just shy of Mr Musk’s goal of delivering 500,000 vehicles in 2020, shipping 499,500 – or 99.1 per cent of the goal. That’s still more than double what the next-highest sellers of electric vehicles delivered for the year, including companies like Volkswagen.

Some models feature a “ludicrous mode” that allows jaw-dropping acceleration.