A genuinely sickening amount of money
Elon Musk is now apparently worth an unbelievable $230 billion, making him wealthier than business magnates Bill Gates and Warren Buffet combined.
The Microsoft founder used to be the high watermark against which standards of wealth were always measured back in the day and Buffet’s business empire has held stakes in over 60 of the biggest companies around the world for decades. That being said, to not only overtake them but to surpass their combined wealth is almost impossible to comprehend.
Musk officially overtook Jeff Bezos as the richest man in the world earlier this month after a significant share in SpaceX was sold. According to private equity company CB Insights, the company is now operating at ‘hectocorn,’ status, meaning it is a startup that has reached over $100b in value ($100.3 to be exact).
This is a staggering amount of wealth to have earned in a relatively short amount of time; Musk wasn’t even in the Forbes top ten list last year. Though now out of date, you can see the astronomical surge in wealth in this visualiser.
He doesn’t even appear on the scale until mid-2020, less with less than 20 seconds left on the video. Moreover, there is now only one business valued higher than SpaceX in the world: a Chinese artificial intelligence company called Bytedance.
While Buffet recently donated $4.1 billion to charity back in June and has famously has promised to donate 99 per cent of his wealth when he dies, the likes of Musk and Bezos have been criticised for not doing more with their wealth over recent years.
Musk did pledge to give away $150 million and a further $100 million as part of the carbon removal contest prize – an initiative where he asked participants for ideas on how to practically reducing CO2 emissions at scale – Prince William recently took aim at him and his peers for focusing more on the space race than the planet.
Related links
- SpaceX to launch first all-civilian crew into orbit
- Elon Musk is building robots – has he not seen Terminator?
- Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth tanked after Facebook and Instagram shortage
