Elon Musk has just become the richest person in the world, with a personal fortune valued at $185 billion (£136 billion); the first time the Tesla CEO has topped the global rankings.
He takes the title from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who has been the world’s wealthiest person since 2017.
Musk acknowledged the achievement when a Tesla fan club tweeted him about it, replying only with ‘How strange’ followed by ‘Well, back to work…’
The South African owns about 20% of Tesla’s shares, so has benefited from the US company’s recent performance on the stock market. Tesla’s share price hit $700 billion on Wednesday, making it more valuable than Toyota, Volkswagen, Hyundai, GM and Ford combined. At the start of 2020, it was priced at $115 billion.
It comes on the back of some upbeat news around electric cars. Tesla recently announced that it had produced just over 500,000 cars in 2020, despite the global pandemic. Deliveries in total for 2020 were 499,550 - just 450 short of the target announced at the start of the year.
The figure is another substantial improvement on the previous year for the firm, which reported approximately 367,500 deliveries in 2019 - itself a 50% improvement on 2018.
In addition, the SMMT has just announced that UK sales of electric cars rose by 180% year on year to 108,205 units, bucking the trend of a disappointing year for sales of petrol and diesel cars.
The Tesla Model 3 was the best-selling car in the UK in December, with just under 6000 cars sold. Its 5798 registrations gave it an advantage of more than 1000 over the next most popular car, the new Volkswagen Golf (4470), and more than 2000 over the Ford Fiesta (3367). Model 3 sales weren’t far off double the number of ID 3s that Volkswagen shifted.
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Get your head around this one diesel pushing Porches and Piechs.
When Tesla eventually falls it will have one hell of a fall. Even Musk said it was overvalued many months ago. There is no justification or its current valuation.
If this person is so cash rich, he could help areas of famine, yeah, he could help with the current Pandemic and help feed and shelter those who are struggling with dept, that's just for starters,and there are other over rich for want of a better description who could do the same.
I don't think he is cash rich. He own shares worth billions. He can't lay his hands on it, Peter. Having said that, I'm sure his Nat West Instant Saver Account has a few more bob in there than mine.
. Yeah, I kind of know that, but, there are people round the World who have enough wealth to live how they are now and still donate significant amounts without missing it.
How much do you give away as a proportion of your worth?
Its entirely up to him what he does with his money- like many other wealthy men and women he has an agenda all his own and with his intelligence works on a different level to ordinary people. Its not up to you to tell Musk what to do with his good fortune
Your right, but you can't help but think people vlike him could do an aweful lot of good around the World.
He is doing that in a huge way. He has kick started every polluting legacy car maker into touch by making them switch to electric power to stop poisoning the world. Thats giagantic. Furthermore he has developed multiuse spacecraft and so on and so forth. And thats just 2 things this incredible individual has achieved and hes not even 50 yet. Who knows what else hes going to achieve in the next 20 years. I dont begrudge his fortune at all but I think he will do something incredible with that too
While those are significant achievements, they don't benefit those who need help the most.