Tesla’s Elon Musk overtook Bill Gates as world’s second-richest person, after Jeff Bezos – but will he stay there long after Covid-19?
The CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and The Boring Company earns no salary and doesn’t want to own a house or any physical assets, but his stakes in his companies make him astronomically rich – will the bubble burst amid the economic fallout from the pandemic?
Musk’s rapid rise up the list comes ahead of Tesla’s hotly anticipated debut among the S&P 500 on December 21. After failing to enter the famous stock index during quarterly rebalancing in September, Bloomberg reported that Tesla is now set to become its largest new addition and its sixth-largest member by market capitalisation on joining.
The investment community is even debating whether Tesla should be added in one day or two due to its large size, The Wall Street Journal reported.
But as the Journal also points out, Tesla is “prone to huge swings in price”. That’s on top of the stock market being incredibly volatile during the pandemic.
Which is all to say – has Musk cemented his new spot on the billionaires’ list, or is it just a blip?
The man without a pay cheque
