Elon Musk, the Technoking of Tesla, has been playing a game of tag with his fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos, competing for the title of the richest man on Earth. However, it looks like he might have made a jump that is too big to cover up, as an order placed by Hertz Global Holdings Inc. for 100,000 Teslas has added $28.5Bn to Musk’s net worth, which now stands at $281Bn.
In comparison, the second richest man on Earth-Jeff Bezos, has a net worth of $193 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
But how exactly did the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and many other path defining companies manage to create such a wide gap among himself and other billionaires? First, the order led to a 9.8% increase in Tesla’s stock value, briefly pushing its valuation past $1Bn. 2/3rds of Musk’s net worth comes from stock options.
However, there’s another reason for this gigantic rise in wealth. The seventh tranche of Musk’s massive 2018 stock option package vested in the third quarter, according to a regulatory filing Monday, adding about $8 billion to his net worth.
Moreover, all of Musk’s companies have been growing quite successfully, including Tesla, which registered record breaking revenue of $1.62Bn in Q3, as well as SpaceX, which is looking to start the Starlink internet service pretty soon.
All of this combined has led to Musk adding tens of billions of dollars to his name in just a few months.
