WAD A RUN FOR ELON
Elon Musk just claimed Jeff Bezos’ richest-man crown.
The Tesla CEO saw his net worth surpass the Amazon founder’s on Thursday as his electric-auto maker, which has only recently eked out a profit, continued its staggering stock rally. Musk had been trailing Bezos by less than $3 billion at Wednesday’s close, only to pass the e-tail magnate soon after trading began Thursday morning. By end of day Thursday, the automaker’s fortune had grown by $13.6 billion, to $194.8 billion, as Tesla’s shares closed up 8 percent at $816, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index. Musk owns 170.5 million shares of Tesla, or 18 percent of the Palo Alto, Calif., company.
That vaulted him ahead of Bezos, who finished the day with $185.3 billion, according to data from Bloomberg. It’s the culmination of a remarkable run for the South Africaborn billionaire, who started 2020 with a less than $30 billion fortune that grew more than fivefold as Tesla’s stock price exploded by 700 percent.
“How strange,” Musk tweeted in response to someone telling him that he was the new No. 1, adding: “Well, back to work.”
Strange indeed. Tesla only recently went from losing money to reporting its first full year of profit, and last quarter reported net income of $331 million on sales of $8.77 billion. Amazon, by contrast, reported a profit in its latest quarter of $6.3 billion on eye-popping revenue of $96.1 billion.
Musk himself has tweeted that Tesla’s stock price was “too high.” But since that May tweet, the stock price only ballooned higher, up another 480 percent.
And on Thursday, the company raced past Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook with a market valuation of $773.5 billion, compared to Facebook’s $765 billion. That’s despite the fact that Tesla is expected to report $1.2 billion in net profits for 2020, compared to an anticipated $27 billion in profit for Facebook, according to Refinitiv.
Tesla’s stock zoom has already landed it the title of the world’s largest automaker — despite production that’s a fraction of that by rivals like General Motors and Toyota Motors.
While the Musk and Bezos rivalry on the rich list is new, the men have been competing for years in space, with Bezos at the head of spaceexploration startup Blue Origin and Musk at the head of rocket-maker SpaceX.
Musk, known for his Twitter rants, has trolled Bezos’ space efforts in the past, including in 2018, when Elon blasted Blue Origin as a “copycat.”
SpaceX reportedly makes up nearly $19 billion of Musk’s fortune.
Musk, 49, could get even richer after unlocking multiple stock awards from an eye-popping $50 billion pay package that was approved in early 2018.
Bezos, 56, had been the world’s richest man since he claimed the title from Microsoft tycoon Bill Gates in October 2017, according to Bloomberg. Musk took the No. 2 spot from Gates in November.