South African born entrepreneur Elon Musk has surpassed Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos to become the richest person on the planet.
Musk is currently the CEO of electric carmaker Tesla as well as the founder and CEO of aerospace manufacturer and space transportation service company SpaceX.
Tesla’s share price rallied yesterday boosting Musk’s wealth ahead of Bezos on Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index is a ranking of the 500 most richest people in the world.
According to Bloomberg, Musk’s net worth was $188.5 billion (R2.90 trillion) which was $1.5 billion more than the net worth of Bezos.
Who is Elon Musk?
Elon Musk was born on 28 June 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa. He attended three Pretoria based schools including Pretoria Boys High School.
He spent a few months studying at the University of Pretoria but later moved to Canada where he studied at Queens University.
He would then leave Canada to study business and physics at the University of Pennsylvania and the get his PhD in energy physics at Stanford University.
According to biography, in 1995 Musk along with his brother Kimbal launched their first company Zip2 Corporation which was an online city guide. Their first company was sold for $307 million in cash and $34 million in stock options.
The money from the sale was used to create an online financial services and payment services company called X.com.
According to Business Insider, X.com merged with financial startup to create PayPal.
By 2002 Elon Musk had founded his third company, SpaceX. Musk’s third venture was launched to create spacecraft that could be used for commercial space travel.
According to Forbes, SpaceX is worth $46 billion.
In 2004, Musk become involved the company that he is probably most known for Tesla Inc., which creates affordable electric vehicles. Some of the well known Tesla electric vehicles include the Model S, Model 3 and Model Y.
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