Elon Musk Is The Richest Man On Earth, Again
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – MAY 02: Elon Musk attends The 2022 Met Gala Celebrating “In America: An Anthology of Fashion” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 02, 2022 in New York City.
Photo: (Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue (Getty Images)
Elon Musk’s cream has once again risen to the very top Thursday after his competition for world’s richest person, LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault, had his value slip to a paltry $187 billion.
Tesla Investor Day 2023 Was Pretty Great if You Ignored Elon
Musk and Arnault, who heads up a corporation dedicated to luxury brands like Louis Vuitton and Dior, are often battling it out for top spot on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. Arnault spent several months in the top space as luxury goods flew off the shelves, but the stock has done quite as well as Tesla’s in recent months. Even though it was reported today that Musk’s most recent acquisition, Twitter, lost two-thirds of its value following the sale, Musk is back on top. The golden horde Musk sits on top of rose by $55.3 billion over this time last year, while Arnault’s only rose $24.5 billion. In third is our yacht-owning friend Jeff Bezos at $144 billion followed by Bill Gates at $125 billion and CEO of Oracle Larry Ellison with $118 billion.
Musk dropped to number two late last year, when Tesla shares sank. A huge chunk of Musk’s wealth is tied up in Tesla stock, which took a beating thanks to soft sales and bad press following the Twitter sale. The stock dropped 56 percent over December 2021, down to an unheard-of-for-Tesla price of $108. Today, Tesla stock is trading at $206. Musk also pulled a salary of $56 billion from Tesla last year.
It’s a good thing that all this immense wealth hasn’t gone to Musk’s head. It’s not like he thinks $100,000 is affordable for just about everyone looking to take a ride to Mars. Or that charing customers $15,000 for a merely aspirational software is just a drop in the bucket. Or spend $44 billion on a social media site just for the lolz.
