Elon Musk regained the place as the world’s richest person, after a misstep in late 2022 where Frenchman Bernard Arnault, the chief executive of luxury emporium LVMH, passed him by two months.
Musk’s wealth has been boosted by a nearly 70% rise in Tesla’s stock price this year. Since the start of the year, shares of the electric car maker have risen roughly 100% as investors have turned back to riskier growth stocks. The company has also benefited from increased demand for its electric vehicles after cutting prices on several models.
The rise in Tesla shares brought Musk’s net worth to 176.152 million euros, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. This allows him to comfortably surpass the personal fortune of his French rival, which reaches 174,457 million euros.
Agency details Bloomberg point out that the charitable donations made by Musk did not make much of a dent in his net worth. Between August and December, Tesla’s chief executive gave away 11.6 million shares of the carmaker to unnamed charitable causes. This is equivalent to 1,789 million euros.
The ranking update comes after Twitter, owned by Musk since October, embarked on another downsizing. In this way, the workforce of the social network would have been reduced eight times to reach a number of collaborators below 2,000, compared to the 7,500 employees it had under the previous management.
Other protagonists
The first two months of the year have also been favorable for the rest of the members of this select club. Jeff Bezos, the third richest man in the world, also accumulated 53 million more euros at the beginning of 2023. Equally positive results were registered by investor Warren Buffett, former Microsoft director Steve Ballmer, Google co-founder Larry Page and billionaire Mexican Carlos Slim. Bill Gates, who has been leading this list for a long time, was one of the few who recorded a slight loss of 311 million euros.
Despite the fact that it is a list made in 2023, 18 of the top 20 positions are still dominated by men, mostly of American or European origin. Only two women appear in the top positions: socialite Julia Flesher Koch, who inherited her late husband’s fortune in 2019, and Alice Walton, a member of the family that runs the Walmart retail chain.
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