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Elon Musk has surpassed Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to become the richest man in the world, according to reports.
Musk, the billionaire businessman who founded Tesla, has a net worth of more than $ 188.5 billion (£ 139 billion) after his company’s shares gained more than 5% on Thursday.
Bloomberg reported that this put him $ 1.5 billion (£ 1.1 billion) ahead of Bezos.
The 49-year-old has seen his personal wealth fueled by a nearly 800% rise in the value of Tesla shares last year.
But he didn’t seem impressed when he responded to a Twitter account talking about his new status, tweeting: “How strange. Well, let’s get back to work …”
Musk, who was born in South Africa, has a 20% stake in Tesla, the world’s most valuable automaker, and about $ 42 billion of unrealized paper earnings on purchased stock options, according to the Bloomberg report.
But the Forbes Billionaires List has a more conservative estimate of Musk’s wealth, putting him below Bezos at $ 7.8 billion.
In addition to Tesla, he runs rocket company SpaceX and Neuralink, which is working on ultra-high-bandwidth machine interfaces for connect human brains to computers.
Meanwhile, Bezos could still have led Musk had it not been for their divorce: His ex-wife MacKenzie Scott became the third richest woman in the world. when they parted ways in april 2019.
Bezos gave $ 2 billion to U.S. charitable causes in 2018and pledged $ 10 billion to fight climate change in early 2020.
He also donated $ 100 million to an initiative to help food banks during the coronavirus crisis.
