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Elon Musk Is Now The Seventh Richest Man In The World

Elon Musk Is Now The Seventh Richest Man In The World

The SpaceX and Tesla owner has seen his wealth - sorry - skyrocket

Tom Wood

Tom Wood

Elon Musk is now the seventh richest person on the planet because the price of stock in Tesla - his electric car company - has shot up in recent times.

This latest increase in the value of Tesla stock to an all-time high has seen the South African entrepreneur rocket - if you'll excuse that completely intentional pun - past fellow billionaire Warren Buffett in the wealth stakes.

In fact, his riches increased by $6 billion (£4.75 billion) just on Friday, meaning that he's now worth $70.5 billion (£55.5 billion) in total.

That's a staggering amount of money, let alone to get hold of in one single day.

PA

Tesla's market value has been on the up for a while, but last week it reached dizzying new heights and is up 259 percent this year when compared to the benchmark S&P index's [the average performance of the 500 largest companies] one percent gain.

So, the upshot of this is that Musk is now the seventh richest person on the planet.

Making his move, he's now gone past Buffett, because he saw his wealth decline this week when he gave away loads of Berkshire Hathaway stocks to charity.

In fact, according to Bloomberg, Buffett has given away $37 billion (£29.3 billion) worth of stock since 2006.

Speaking to Bloomberg Television about the meteoric rise of Tesla, Musk said: "We are in irrational exuberance - this is a bubble.

"The economy is grinding, slowing down, we're lurching in and out of Covid, yet the tech market makes new highs every day. That's a classic speculative bubble."

PA

All of this is great, but it's actually a fairly nebulous thing to attempt to measure.

If Tesla is doing well, that automatically means Musk is doing well, but is it really his own personal wealth? Sure, he's the CEO, but he doesn't actually draw a salary from the company.

He's devised a hugely complicated pay structure that we won't get into here, but it allows him to buy huge amounts of heavily discounted Tesla stock when the company reaches certain goals regarding profitability and market capitalisation milestones.

Earlier this year, they hit one of those, so he's quids in.

Tesla is now actually the world's most valuable car company, which is weird when you consider they make relatively tiny amounts of cars compared with their rivals.

But what can one person do with this wealth? Surely nobody actually needs these figures of money for themselves?

PA

Speaking to Joe Rogan recently, Musk said: "It doesn't make a lot of sense in most cases if you've basically organised a company,

"How does this wealth arise? If you organise people in a better way to produce products and services that are better than existed before, and you have some ownership in that company then that essentially gives you the right to allocate more capital."

Whatever, he's really rich, that's the point.

Featured Image Credit: PA

Topics: Celebrity, Money, US News, Technology