Elon Musk becomes the third richest person in the world, overtaking Zuckerberg

The Tesla-SpaceX king Elon Musk outrivalled Mark Zuckerberg in the position among the richest persons in the world. Musk is now the third richest in the world, behind Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Microsoft ex-head Bill Gates. According to the Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index, Musk’s wealth more than quadrupled to $115 billion (£85bn) since the start of the year.

The SpaceX and Tesla boss overtook Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg on Monday, after seeing a $117 billion increment in his personal fortune.

Only Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Microsoft founder Bill Gates rank above Musk on the index, with the combined wealth of the top four wealthiest men totalling more than half a trillion dollars.

All four of the US tech tycoons have seen their fortunes surge during the corona virus pandemic, as share prices in the companies have bucked market trends to rise considerably. Counting Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, as well as former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, US technology billionaires now make up seven of the top 10 richest people.

The combined wealth gains of the seven men since the start of 2020 now totals $267.1bn, taking their joint fortunes to $780.6bn. This combined net worth now ranks in the top 20 countries globally in terms of GDP – ahead of Saudi Arabia and Switzerland – according to the International Monetary Fund.

The wealth gains of billionaires during the pandemic has been criticized by human rights organizations and politicians. US Senators Bernie Sanders, Kristen Gillibrand and Ed Markey have called for a one-time pandemic wealth tax on billionaires’ windfall gains. Their Make Billionaires Pay Act would recover 60 per cent of all the money gained since March in order to provide health care for all.

“At a time of enormous economic pain and suffering, we have a fundamental choice to make,” Senator Sanders said in August. “We can continue to allow the very rich to get much richer while everyone else gets poorer and poorer. Or we can tax the winnings a handful of billionaires made during the pandemic to improve the health and well-being of tens of millions of Americans”, he added.

Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX was born in 1971 in USA. He is an engineer, industrial designer, technology entrepreneur and philanthropist. He is the founder, CEO, CTO and chief designer of SpaceX; early investor, CEO and product architect of Tesla, Inc.; founder of The Boring Company; co-founder of Neuralink; and co-founder and initial co-chairman of OpenAI.