Elon Musk is now so wealthy that he's making a mockery of the rich list.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO was worth $1.08 trillion as of Monday's market close, per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The next-richest person in the world, Alphabet cofounder Larry Page, was less than a third as wealthy with a net worth of $299 billion.
In fact, Musk is richer than the next four people in the billionaire rankings: Page, his cofounder Sergey Brin, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, who were together worth $1.06 trillion as of Monday's close.
The sheer scale of Musk's fortune means shifts in others' fortunes now pale in comparison. For example, Page, Brin, and Bezos each lost more than $10 billion in Monday's tech rout.
Those losses look paltry compared to Musk's $152 billion wealth decline on the same day, fueled by a 16% plunge in SpaceX's stock just days after its blockbuster IPO.
Put differently, Musk lost in one day a sum that exceeds Warren Buffett's entire fortune. The 95-year-old investor and Berkshire Hathaway chairman ranked 10th on Bloomberg's list with a $146 billion net worth at Monday's close.
Given Musk has a $700 billion-plus lead over anyone else, he simply looks out of place on a mere billionaires list. He's started a trillionaire club with only one member.
The wealth gap between Musk and his rich-list peers has only grown truly stark in the past few months. In fact, Ellison briefly leapfrogged him in September to become the world's richest person despite being worth less than $400 billion.
The key reason for Musk's net worth skyrocketing has been SpaceX's soaring valuation, which has boosted his fortune by $456 billion in less than six months, per Bloomberg's list.
That wealth gain has catapulted Musk into a league of his own and given him a seemingly insurmountable lead over the rest of the billionaire pack.
The yawning divide reflects Musk's large stakes in two companies valued at over $1 trillion: Tesla and SpaceX. It's hard to see anyone catching up to him, barring a massive crash in either company's stock price, given nobody else has two horses of that size in the wealth race.
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Theron Mohamed is a London-based correspondent on the Trending team at Business Insider. His coverage spans finance, investing, wealth, markets, and the economy.Theron joined BI in 2019 as a reporter at Markets Insider and rose to the rank of correspondent before moving to the Trending team in 2024. He previously covered tech, media, and telecom stocks for Investors Chronicle magazine and had a brief stint on the Financial Times' Data team. He interned at the Wall Street Journal in New York where he primarily wrote for Heard on the Street.Theron has freelanced for The Independent, The Telegraph, WIRED, and several smaller publications. He holds an undergraduate degree in geography from the London School of Economics, and a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University.Theron often covers Warren Buffett, Michael Burry, Jeremy Grantham and other top-flight investors. He also writes about the world's wealthiest people and shares financial advice from all manner of rich and successful people.Email Theron at [email protected] and follow him on X @theron_mohamed.Expertise
- Corporate finance
- Stocks and investing
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- Business history
- US economy
- Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway
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