Elon Musk was the richest person in the world for about four days, overtaking Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos for the No. 1 slot on Thursday before Tesla’s stock nosedived on Monday and wiped out nearly $14billion in the company’s value.
Musk’s net worth eclipsed $188.5billion on Thursday thanks to a 6 per cent surge of Tesla stock on Thursday.
The previous day, the electric car maker saw its shares climb more than 4.6 per cent.
At the time, Bezos’ net worth was estimated to be $187billion.
But on Monday, Tesla’s stock dropped precipitously. Shares of Tesla fell almost 8 per cent on Monday, the largest one-day dip since late September.
According to Forbes, Musk’s net worth dropped to $176.2billion, nearly $6billion less than that of the 57-year-old Bezos.
As of mid-day on Tuesday, however, Musk, 49, appears poised to regain the title of world’s richest person.
Shares of Tesla soared by more than 5 per cent while Amazon stock fell by slightly less than a half of a percentage point as of mid-day on Tuesday.
If those trends hold by the end of trading on Wall Street on Tuesday, Musk will once again be the world’s richest person, according to the Forbes billionaire tracker.
In the brief moments that Musk held the title of richest person, he appeared to brush off the accolades on Thursday morning.
The Twitter account for the Tesla Owners of Silicon Valley wrote: ‘@elonmusk is now the richest person in the world at $190 billion.’
In one tweet, Musk wrote: ‘How strange.’ He followed that tweet up with: ‘Well, back to work …’
Musk overtook Bill Gates as the second-richest person in November, a significant jump for the entrepreneur who started off 2020 ranked 35.
French fashion mogul Bernard Arnault, the billionaire founder of LVMH, and his family have the third largest net worth in the world – $151.4billion, according to Forbes.
Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist, is a distant fourth at $121.3billion.
Musk has a 20 per cent stake in the carmaker and about $42billion of unrealized paper gains on vested stock options, according to Bloomberg.
He also has a 48 per cent stake in his aerospace company, SpaceX.
