Elon Musk, whose $44 billion takeover bid for Twitter was unanimously approved by the social media company’s board of directors on Monday, is the world’s richest person with a current net worth of $257bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Mr Musk’s enormous fortune exceeds that of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — the world’s second-wealthiest person with a net worth of $170bn — by $87bn.
The 50-year-old founder and chief executive of electric vehicle maker Tesla and rocket company Space X was crowned the world’s richest person in January this year, when his net worth was valued at $273.5bn by Bloomberg, which compared his wealth with John D Rockefeller.
“Mr Musk reached the level of riches, inflation-adjusted, achieved by modern history’s wealthiest person,” Bloomberg said at the time.
On April 14, Mr Musk launched his surprise bid for Twitter after becoming the micro blogging platform’s largest single shareholder with a stake of 9.2 per cent, or 73.5 million shares valued at about $3bn.
His offer price of $54.20 per share represents a 38 per cent premium on the closing price of Twitter’s stock on April 1, the last trading day before his investment in the company was publicly announced.
Despite raising $46.5bn to finance his bid to buy Twitter, a combination of volatile stock markets, the Russia-Ukraine crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic has taken a toll on Mr Musk’s net worth, which has fallen by $13bn since the beginning of the year, Bloomberg said.
Meanwhile, Mr Musk was also declared the richest person in the world earlier this month by Forbes magazine in its annual 2022 World Billionaires List with a personal fortune of $219bn.
The Forbes annual list used stock prices and exchange rates from March 11 to calculate Mr Musk’s net worth, whereas the Bloomberg Billionaires Index is updated daily.
However, the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires list, which is updated daily, puts Mr Musk’s current net worth at $268.2bn.
“Even after selling billions of dollars of Tesla stock late last year, and owing taxes on gains from those sales, Musk is an estimated $68bn richer than a year ago,” Forbes said in its annual report.
The Canadian-American businessman, who was born in South Africa and has seven children, owns about 17 per cent of Tesla, a February 2021 regulatory filing showed.
His stake in privately held SpaceX is valued at about $40.3bn, figures compiled by Bloomberg show.
Mr Musk has a history of posting market-moving tweets to stoke interest in his ventures, which has drawn the ire of the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
In March, Bitcoin, Ether and Dogecoin were given a quick boost after he tweeted that he owns the digital tokens and isn’t planning to sell.
In response, Bitcoin, which had fallen as much as 2.9 per cent before Mr Musk’s tweet, wiped out its losses then retreated again. Ether was also up as much as 2.3 per cent before giving up some gains, while Dogecoin rose 3.8 per cent.
In November, Tesla’s shares fell as much as 4.5 per cent at the start of trading in New York, having dropped nearly 7 per cent in premarket trading after Mr Musk asked his more than 80 million followers on Twitter whether he should sell 10 per cent of his holdings in the electric vehicle maker. A clear majority (58 per cent) of the 3.5 million Twitter users who voted said yes.
Mr Musk made his first millions in the 1990s, when he sold his first company, Zip2, for more than $300m. He then launched X.com, an online payment system that eventually became PayPal, which he sold to eBay for $1.5bn in 2022.
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