Elon Musk becomes world's richest person; overtakes Amazon's Bezos

Tesla Inc.'s Chief Elon Musk has surpassed Amazon.com Inc’s Jeff Bezos to become the world’s richest man.

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According to the reports, including Thursday's gains in Tesla shares, Musk had a net worth of more than $188.5 billion, $1.5 billion more than Bezos.

Musk’s personal wealth has been boosted by last year’s more than eight-fold surge in the shares of Tesla, which became the world’s most valuable carmaker.

Reports state that he has a 20% stake in the carmaker and about $42 billion of unrealized paper gains on vested stock options.

Tesla shares were up as much as 7.4% on Thursday at a record high of $811.61.

Musk, who co-founded and sold Internet payments company PayPal Holdings Inc, now leads some of the most futuristic companies in the world.

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Besides Tesla, he heads rocket company SpaceX and Neuralink, a startup that is developing ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect the human brain to computers.

He had set up the company to make affordable tunnels below busy city streets for an all-electric public transportation system to avoid the nasty traffic jams in U.S. cities. -PTC News