Tesla Co-Founder Elon Musk has joined the CentiBillionaire ($100 billion) club.
Elon Musk rose one place last night to become the fourth richest person in the world after Tesla stock hit fresh highs and became CentiBillionaire. His current net worth stands at $95.5 Billion after touching $100 billion marks.
The 5 Centi Billionaire are- Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Bernard Arnault, Mark Zuckerberg & Elon Musk
The entrepreneur jumped above Bernard Arnault, the French billionaire, and chief executive of Louis Vuitton.
Things have been hotting up among the world’s richest during the lockdown and only Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Microsoft founder Bill Gates are worth more than Musk.
On Wednesday night Tesla stock rose by 2%, adding to Monday night’s 11% gain. Shares in the electric car company have risen 339% this year.
Elon Musk owns 21% of Tesla’s stock, meaning every time it rises his wealth is boosted.
In May, Elon Musk was paid a whopping $700 million in one of the biggest paydays corporate America has ever seen.
The radical entrepreneur earnt the bonus after Tesla hit some targets.
The payout was part of a generous package approved by the company’s board in 2018, one of the largest in US history.
Musk has chosen not to have a base salary with the company, instead opting for deeply discounted Tesla shares.
On Thursday, Shares of Tesla rose 7 percent to close at an all-time high of $2,001.83 per share.
This was the first time that the car manufacturer, headed by Elon Musk, reached the mark of $2,000 per share, also after this year’s rally that sent shares to skyrocket. Tesla climbed up as much as 8 percent in intraday trading Thursday to touch $2,021.99 per share before paring some gains.
The surge propelled Tesla’s market capitalization to almost $372 billion, surpassing Walmart’s market valuation of about $371 billion. Earlier in the year, Tesla became the world’s most successful automaker after overshadowing the market value of Toyota.
Musk’s fortune increased this year by more than $57 billion, the second-biggest rise on the index after Jeff Bezos’s- founder of Amazon.com Inc. By 2020, the wealthiest man in the world has racked up $73 billion and is now worth $188 billion.
Last month Elon Musk unlocked the second chunk of his big fat paycheck.
The average trailing market value of the electric-car maker over six months on Tuesday rose above $150 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, despite a dip in the share price of the company. That means Musk can now exercise a further 1.69 million stock options, although he must wait at least five years before he can sell them.
The options have a strike price of $350.02, meaning that if he exercised, he would reap a gain of $2.1 billion and could sell the shares immediately.
