Tesla’s Musk zooms past Facebook co-founder Zuckerberg after stock split, is now worth US$115.4 billion

Name: Tesla starts delivery of made-in-China cars
Uploaded: 2020-09-01T00:48:46.000Z
Duration: 1 min 20 s
Description: Tesla starts delivery of made-in-China cars

Musk’s net worth has grown by US$87.8 billion this year as Tesla shares surged almost 500 per cent

Heady pace of wealth accumulation among world’s richest in recent months is in stark contrast to the state of the global economy

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Musk joined Zuckerberg, Bezos and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates in the rarefied centibillionaire club last week as technology stocks rose. Photo: Reuters

Bloomberg

Published: 8:48am, 1 Sep 2020Updated: 9:03am, 1 Sep 2020

Elon Musk is now the third-richest person in the world. He passed Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg on Monday as shares of Tesla continued their unrelenting rally after undergoing a forward stock split.

Musk is now worth US$115.4 billion compared with US$110.8 billion for Zuckerberg, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Also on Monday, Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife MacKenzie Scott became the world’s richest woman, passing L’Oreal heiress Francoise Bettencourt Meyers. Scott, 50, who received a 4 per cent stake in Amazon.com as part of her divorce from founder Bezos, is now worth US$66.4 billion.

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Tesla starts delivery of made-in-China cars

Musk, 49, has seen a meteoric rise in his wealth, with his net worth growing by US$87.8 billion this year as Tesla shares surged almost 500 per cent. Also helpful was an audacious pay package – the largest corporate pay deal ever struck between a chief executive and a board of directors – that could yield him more than US$50 billion if all goals are met.

Tesla, a favourite among amateur investors on online trading firm Robinhood Financial, has been one of the largest beneficiaries of the boom in retail investing during pandemic lockdowns. At one point last month, almost 40,000 Robinhood accounts added Tesla shares during a single four-hour span. And the trend is not limited to the US. South Korean retail investors have piled into Tesla this year and hold about a 1 per cent stake in the American carmaker.

Tesla’s US$464 billion market value now exceeds that of retail behemoth Walmart, the largest company in the US by revenue.

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