Elon Musk, founder of high-end electric vehicle maker Tesla, is now the richest man in the world thanks to the soaring of his firm’s shares on the stock market, according to agency calculations Bloomberg.
With the rise of Tesla stocks on the stock market, and with 18% ownership of the company, the entrepreneur of 49 years who also runs SpaceX, thus surpasses Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who was the richest man in the world since 2017, according to the agency that has a billionaire ranking.
Tesla’s stock more than seven times higher in value in 2020 and continued to rise on Wall Street on Thursday, bringing the fortune of this South African-born engineer reached $188.5 billion shortly after opening the bag, $1.5 billion more than Bezos accumulated.
Tesla Wednesday exceeded $700 billion for the first time of market capitalization at the close of the New York Stock Exchange with an increase of almost 3% of its shares to 755.98 dollars.
On Thursday morning, the stock was close to $800, up 5.7%.
However, the group’s sales are still far from those of traditional vehicle manufacturers: Tesla sold 499,550 vehicles in 2020, far from Volkswagen’s 11 million in 2019.
However, Tesla benefits from investor optimism for the future of electric vehicles and the fact of making money in five consecutive quarters, which helped it enter the prestigious S&P 500 Index in December.
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