Wow, Such Billions. Dogecoin Advocate Elon Musk Now the Richest Person in the World

Much share price increase. Very crypto.

In brief

• Elon Musk is now the richest person in the world.
• As of today, he’s worth $188 billion.
• Jeff Bezos has been bumped to second place.

Tesla founder and occasional Dogecoin advocate Elon Musk is now the richest person in the world, according to Bloomberg.

Thanks to a recent increase in the price of Tesla stock, he’s worth around $188 billion. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, formerly the richest person in the world, has been bumped to second place; he’s now worth about $187 billion.

Musk was only worth $27 billion at the start of 2020, which is to say that he made over a million dollars a minute this past year. The price of Tesla shares soared throughout 2020, even as the company appeared to burn through an enormous amount of cash. Bloomberg has called Musk’s personal wealth accumulation “perhaps the fastest… in history.”

Tesla stock is up nearly 5% today, and is trading around $800 a share. Musk owns a 20% stake in the company, which is now worth over $700 billion.

“How strange,” commented Musk on Twitter, after spotting the news about his wealth. He followed up: “Well, back to work.”

Musk, who heads up SpaceX, has said in the past that he intends to use his wealth to get humans into outer space; “I want to be able to contribute as much as possible to the city on Mars,” he told Axel Springer’s CEO last month. “That means just a lot of capital.”

In a 2018 tweet, the Tesla don explained that he’d also use “about half” of his money to “help problems on earth.”

Musk’s tweets, both silly and serious, have landed the CEO in hot water in the past. They’ve also managed to raise the price of the cryptocurrency Dogecoin, which is now trading at over $.01.