Tesla CEO Elon Musk is no longer the richest person on the planet — the crown now belongs to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Musk, who also owns X (formally known as Twitter), runs SpaceX and founded xAI, among other initiatives, was at the top of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index for more than nine months. As of Monday, Musk is now No. 2 with a net worth of $197.7 billion, while Bezos tops the list at $200.3 billion. Bernard Arnault, chairman of the world’s largest luxury goods company LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, is now No. 3 and not too far behind Musk, with a net worth of $197.5 billion.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk in Washington, DC, on March 09, 2020; and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos in Washington, DC, on October 22, 2019. Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI, MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images
Bezos hasn’t been first in Bloomberg’s ranking since 2021, and the wealth gap between him and Musk was once as large as $142 billion.
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The Bloomberg Billionaires Index measures the net worth of the world’s 500 richest people based on markets, the economy, and Bloomberg’s own reports. Each profile breaks down personal wealth quantitatively and through a written report and confidence rating.
Bloomberg details through Bezos’s profile, for example, that he has about $17.9 billion in cash, $15 billion in private assets (the space exploration company Blue Origin, which he owns), and $167 billion in public assets (Amazon).
Musk’s profile shows a different distribution of net worth, with most of his wealth coming from private and public companies.
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According to human rights group Oxfam, $26 trillion (63%) of all new wealth went to the richest 1% in the world, while $16 trillion (37%) went to the remaining 99% over the past two years.
“A billionaire gained roughly $1.7 million for every $1 of new global wealth earned by a person in the bottom 90 percent,” the report stated.
In the U.S., billionaires hold $4.48 trillion in combined value and their wealth is 1.5 times the amount it was at the beginning of the pandemic according to Statista.
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