Tesla co-founder, Elon Musk has become the richest man in the world, surpassing Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos on the Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index, which is the ranking of the world’s 500 wealthiest people.
The 49-year-old rallied to first place following a 4.8% rise in the electric carmaker’s share price on Thursday. Tesla shares surged 743% last year on the back of consistent profits.
As of Wednesday, the Bloomberg real-time billionaire tracker had placed Musk within $3 billion of Bezos, but has now risen above the 56-year-old.
The Pretoria, South Africa-born tech entrepreneur’s network was estimated at $188.5 billion at 10:15 a.m. on Thursday in New York, $1.5 billion more than Bezos, Bloomberg reported.
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Bezos had held the top spot since October 2017.
Musk, who is also the chief executive officer of Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX), was able to achieve the extraordinary feat thanks to a $150 billion surge in networth in the past year.
His meteorite rise has been described as the “fastest bout of wealth creation in history”.