Apart from memes and his absurd sense of humor, Elon Musk is quite a rich guy. And this time, he went on to defeat the 2nd richest person on the earth and become the top gun in the world of riches after, of course, Jeffrey Preston Bezos.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Elon Musk surpassed the Microsoft founder and now stands at a net worth of $128 billion, exceeding his net worth by $100 billion for the year 2020. However, the competition doesn’t end here because Elon Musk is miles away from the number one spot, taken by the founder and CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos.

Apart from Musk’s major ventures like Neuralink, OpenAI, The Boring Company, and the space transportation company SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rapid surge to wealth was mainly contributed by Tesla, which is an innovative electric car company.

Tesla holds an approximate $500 billion market cap, and according to The Guardian reports, Tesla holds the highest market cap in the world. No other car company has this much influence in the history of the market cap of the automotive industry.

One strange fact about Tesla is the number of cars they produce in a year, which is comparatively less than any of its competitors. Even though Tesla has only four models, in 2020, Tesla sold over 1 million electric cars to worldwide customers.

One significant contribution to Musk’s rise to the 2nd richest man list is the charity spree of Bill Gates. In 2020 Gates donated $45.5 billion in charity and founded the “Giving Pledge,” a movement to ask billionaires to donate most of their wealth to charities. The campaign currently has 200 signatures from 20 countries to donate $1.2 trillion to charities worldwide.

Earlier, the disagreement between Gates and Elon sparked controversy regarding Gates’s opinion on electric semi-trucks, electric cargo ships, and passenger jets, which, according to gates, lacks practicality. Elon replied to the statement by saying, ‘Bill Gates had no clue about the viability of electric trucks.’

While Elon Musk sits as the second richest person on the planet, Mark Zuckerberg was pushed to fifth position from the 3rd after Elon seized the second position with Tesla expansion as the most prominent clean energy-based company in the world.

Behind the scenes, SpaceX also contributed an ample amount of valuable success with its latest mission, where Dragon spacecraft, which is a reusable space cargo spacecraft, conducted the travel of four astronauts to the International Space Station.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which updates the ranking index on every trading day, the current top 5 billionaires are Jeff Bezos ($182B ), Elon R Musk ($128B ), Bill Gates ($128B ),  Bernard Arnault ($105B ) and Mark Zuckerberg ($102B .)

Source: https://a5office.co.uk/elon-musk-becomes-the-worlds-second-richest-person-behind-jeff-bezos/