Elon Musk's pile of money is now bigger than Bill Gates's pile of money
In the battle of rich, white dudes becoming even richer, Elon Musk is winning.
The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has overtaken Bill Gates to become the second richest man in the world, behind Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Bloomberg has assessed.
This is due to Tesla stock recently soaring after becoming part of the S&P 500 index, propelling Musk's net worth to $127.9 billion, which is slightly (by slightly, I mean $200 million) more than Gates's $127.7 billion. Bezos is still far ahead with a net worth of $182 billion.
While this sounds like a near-insurmountable gap, one should consider that Musk added $100.3 billion to his net worth just in 2020. Musk and Bezos are also rivals in the space race (Bezos is CEO of spaceflight company Blue Origin), so this battle of titans will be an interesting one to watch play out.
Bloomberg says this is only the second time in eight years that Gates is ranked lower than number two. The man has been giving away billions to charitable causes so we can assume he's not that interested in the ranking, anyways.
Musk, who has a $0 salary at Tesla, is poised to become significantly richer over the next couple of years. The man has a lucrative compensation plan which could net him billions if Tesla keeps hitting some very ambitious goals, which so far it has.
Stan is a Senior Editor at Mashable, where he has worked since 2007. He's got more battery-powered gadgets and band t-shirts than you. He writes about the next groundbreaking thing. Typically, this is a phone, a coin, or a car. His ultimate goal is to know something about everything.
