Elon Musk Company Net Worth: Bloomberg estimates that Elon Musk has a net worth of approximately $239 billion, making him the richest person in the planet.
However, the tech mogul’s fortune is unstable and derived from numerous sources. Since the beginning of the pandemic, his wealth has fluctuated significantly, and he has exchanged positions with other tech billionaires atop Bloomberg’s rich list.
How has Musk’s wealth fluctuated over time?
Before turning 30, Musk, who was born in South Africa, migrated to Canada, and dropped out of Stanford’s Ph.D. programme, became a millionaire. Musk and his brother Kimbal Musk founded Zip2, a website that provided city travel directories to newspapers, and sold it to Compaq for more than $300 million in 1999. Musk, then 27 years old, is believed to have received $22 million from the transaction.
In 1999, he cofounded the online bank X.com. It quickly merged with Peter Thiel’s Confinity to form PayPal, and eBay acquired the company for $1.5 billion in 2002. Despite being fired as CEO, Musk received approximately $165 million.
In 2002, Musk cofounded the space exploration company SpaceX. In 2004, he became an investor and chairman of electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla. During the 2008 financial crisis, he spared Tesla from bankruptcy by investing $40 million and lending $40 million. In the same year, he was appointed CEO.
2008, according to Musk, was “the worst year of my life.” In addition to his personal issues, Tesla continued to lose money and SpaceX was having difficulty launching the Falcon 1 rocket. Musk was surviving off of personal loans in 2009.
However, Tesla went public in 2010, and Musk’s estimated net worth increased consistently. In 2012, he made his debut on Forbes’ Billionaires List with an estimated $2 billion in fortune.
In 2016, Elon Musk founded the Boring Company, a tunnel-digging company. The following year, he established the neurotechnology venture Neuralink.
Musk’s net worth rose rapidly at the beginning of the pandemic, as Tesla shares surged. Musk began 2020 with an estimated net worth of just under $30 billion and ended the year with a net worth of approximately $170 billion, an increase of more than fivefold in just one year. In November 2021, his estimated fortune crested at approximately $340 billion.
In addition, he purchased Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022 and served as its CEO until early June.
Bloomberg estimates his current net worth to be $239 billion, while Forbes estimates it to be $242.4 billion.
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Elon Musk Company Net Worth
Musk’s fortune relies heavily on Tesla shares. Even though he does not receive a salary from Tesla, he is granted stock options when the company meets demanding performance metrics.
“Elon will receive no guaranteed compensation of any kind — no salary, no cash bonuses, and no equity that vests simply by the passage of time,” Tesla stated in 2018 when a 10-year performance award for Musk was announced. “Instead, Elon’s only compensation will be a 100 percent at-risk performance award, ensuring that he will only be compensated if Tesla and all of its shareholders perform exceptionally well.”
According to Bloomberg, nearly half of Musk’s net worth is comprised of Tesla shares, while slightly more than 20% is comprised of SpaceX shares. The remainder of his wealth consists of Twitter and The Boring Company stock and other miscellaneous assets.
How compares Elon Musk to other billionaires?
Bloomberg estimated that Musk was the world’s richest person at the time of writing, though he frequently trades positions with other billionaires.
Bloomberg estimates that Musk’s current wealth exceeds that of LVMH founder Bernard Arnault by approximately $38 billion. Completing the top five are Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, with $153 billion, Bill Gates, cofounder of Microsoft, with $137 billion, and Larry Ellison, cofounder of Oracle, with $133 billion.
