A NEW KING OF CASH... BUT WHO’S KING OF FLASH
As Elon Musk rockets past Jeff Bezos to become the richest man in the world (and leaves Bill Gates trailing) the billion-dollar question...
FORGET ‘who wants to be a millionaire?’ If you want to be up among the richest people in the world, it’s going to take billions. Just ask Elon Musk, who yesterday leapfrogged Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to become the richest man on the planet.
On Wednesday, the 49-year- old South Africa-born engineer’s fortune stood at $181 billion (£133 billion) and Bezos’s at $184 billion (£136 billion). But thanks to a surge in the share price of his electric car company Tesla, his fortune — which goes up by tens of millions every day — had risen yesterday to $188.5 billion (£139 billion).
Bezos, 56, had held the top spot since October 2017, when he overtook Microsoft founder Bill Gates, 65, who has a net worth of $119.3 billion (£88 billion).
The trio, who all made their billions from technology, form a very exclusive club of tycoons to have held the title of the world’s richest man, jostling for first, second and third position as stock prices and fortunes have wavered.
And from a love of private jets and fancy houses, through to costly divorces, that’s not all these moneybags have in common.
But while Musk may currently be the richest, who is the flashest? Who still drives a seven-year-old Honda, who can’t boast of an art collection, and who has sworn off space travel? CLAUDIA CONNELL invites you little people to take a look at the richest men in the world …
LUXURY JETS & GAS-GUZZLING CARS
MUSK: He is careful to be seen driving his own electric vehicles, with an £80,000 Model S Tesla his car of choice. He was seen recently driving the prototype of his new £40,000 Cybertruck. The man who wants people to drive greener cars also keeps a gas guzzling 1967 Jaguar E-Type worth £60,000 and owns two private jets — a Gulfstream G550, which costs £45 million and a £48 million Gulfstream G650.
BEZOS: The Amazon boss is no petrolhead. The last time he was asked about his car, he revealed he drove a seven-year- old Honda Accord. He scores some billionaire points with his £48 million private jet, an eight- seater Gulfstream G650ER, and the £3.5 million hanger he bought to keep it in.
GATES: The climate- change activist recently bought a £116,000 Porsche Taycan Turbo (but at least it’s electric). He also so has a £100,000 Ferrari 348 and a £60,000 Jaguar XJ6. He describes his jet — a £29 million, 19- seater Bombardier BD-700 — as his ‘guilty pleasure’.
FIRING UP THE SPACE RACE
MUSK: Like a comic book villain, he is obsessed with ‘colonising’ Mars. He founded his SpaceX company in 2002 and last year it became the first private company to send humans into orbit when it flew two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. He says that by 2050 he will have a city of one million people on the Red Planet, who’d all have paid around £375,000 to relocate.
BEZOS: Twenty years ago he founded Blue Origin, a company that aims to make space travel available to all (as long as you’re filthy rich). He envisages a future where people will live in floating space colonies with ecosystems similar to Earth.
GATES: He has stated that he’s not ‘in the least bit interested’ in joining the billionaire space race, recently calling Musk’s Mars colonisation plan ‘delusional’.
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LOVE, MARRIAGE & COSTLY DIVORCES
MUSK: He met first wife, author Justine, when they were students. They married in 2000 and split after eight years years. During a bitter divorce divorce, Justine, mother of his five sons, accused him of under-valuing his assets. The judge rejected her claims and Musk gave her a £9 million settlement. In 2010, he married British actress Talulah Riley, now 35, but divorced on friendly terms two years later. In 2013, they remarried — only to divorce again in 2016, with the total settlement estimated to be £20 million.
BEZOS: When you’re divorcing the world’s richest man man, you can expect a handsome payout. In 2019, he agreed to a £28 billion settlement after splitting with MacKenzie Scott, his wife of 26 years and mother to his four children.
She is now a successful novelist who has kept a four per cent share in Amazon worth £26 billion.
GATES: No divorce bills for Bill; he has been happily married to Melinda for 26 years.
SCANDALS, TWEETS & CONSPIRACIES
MUSK: In 2018, he tweeted that he was thinking of taking Tesla private at a cost of $420 (£310) per share — way more than its trading value — and had secured the funding to do so. It led to a £30 million fine from trading body the Security and Exchanges Commission.
When 12 boys were trapped in a cave in Thailand, Musk sent a submarine for the rescue operation. It was never used, and when British diver Vernon Unsworth accused him of being an attentionseeker, Musk called him ‘ pedo guy’ on Twitter. Unsworth sued for defamation but lost. BEZOS: Shortly after his separation from MacKenzie, the National Enquirer published intimate texts between him and new girlfriend Lauren Sanchez, which, they claimed, proved they had been conducting an affair for many months. Bezos then accused the U.S. tabloid of blackmailing him with the threat of publishing more texts and nude photos if he didn’t call off an investigation into who leaked the texts. The Enquirer responded by saying Lauren’s brother Michael Sanchez had supplied the information in return for £150,000.
In addition, Amazon — worth nearly £ 2 trillion — has been accused of swerving £75 billion of global taxes over the past decade. GATES: Did you know Bill Gates is responsible for Covid-19? He manufactured the virus in order to make a fortune from a vaccine.
None of this is true, of course — just bonkers conspiracy theories that all stem from a 2010 talk he gave where he predicted that a virus could wipe out millions.
GIVING BACK OR NOT HELPING ENOUGH?
MUSK: It’s hard to imagine a ‘cash poor’ billionaire, but Elon is. Most of his wealth is tied up in his Telsa and SpaceX shares. However, he has given £70 million to charity so far and signed the Giving Pledge, set up by Bill and Melinda Gates, to encourage the super-rich to offload half of their wealth.
BEZOS: He has been criticised for not giving generously enough despite establishing his own charitable t foundation, the Day One Fund, two years ago. It supports homeless families and provides early years education in low income areas, with a £1.5 billion donation. However, Forbes recently stated he donates less than one per cent of his fortune.
He hasn’t signed the Giving Pledge. However, last year, he pledged £7.5 billion to help fight climate change. GATES: To date he has given £37 billion to good causes via the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The couple have vowed to leave only a small amount of their fortune to their children, with the rest going to charity.
MORE HOUSES THAN IN MONOPOLY
MUSK: He announced last year that he intends to sell all his physical possessions, including his homes (worth a total of £100 million). Last summer, a buyer paid £22 million for his seven-bedroom mansion in LA’s exclusive Bel Air.
He is now offering his other four Bel Air houses as part of a bundle at the bargain price of £47 million.
In 2019, he sold another home in Brentwood, LA, for a more modest £2.87 million. BEZOS: Last year, he bought a £123 million estate in Beverly Hills that set a record for house sales in California. The main house (there are three on the ten-acre compound) is 13,000 square feet with eight bedrooms and nine bathrooms. And it’s not even his main home — that’s a sprawling estate in Medina, Washington State, worth £43 million.
Throw in two houses in LA, a £12 million converted museum in Washington DC, numerous apartments in New York and a 330,000-acre ranch in Texas and it adds up to an estimated £200 million property portfolio. GATES: His main home is a huge estate, also in Medina, nicknamed Xanadu 2.0 (after the fictional mansion in Citizen Kane). The main mansion offers 66,000 square feet of space and comes with a pool that plays underwater music.
The estate was recently valued at £94 million. And he has bought a San Diego beachfront mansion for £32 million.
There are two further properties in Florida, an equestrian centre in California and a ski lodge in Montana, adding up to £170 million worth of homes.