Elon Musk's net worth is now US$115 billion, pushing him past Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the list of the world's richest people, according to Bloomberg.
Musk's increase in wealth was propelled by Tesla's wild 12% stock gain that happened Monday after . This makes the Tesla founder and CEO the third-richest person in the world, according to the . He is now only poorer than Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.
The world's top five billionaires (in order) are: Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Bernard Arnault, the CEO of LVMH in France.
Musk is also the founder of several other companies including SpaceX, The Boring Company, Hyperloop and OpenAI.
Tesla's stock has already soared about 500% in 2020, and the company is now worth about $475 billion.
Musk's pay package, which was approved by Tesla shareholders in 2018, doesn't pay him any salary or cash bonuses. Instead, the CEO gets paid in millions of stock options, worth billions of dollars. He has received two multi-billion-dollar payouts as the company hit certain profit and stock price thresholds, and he is .
Musk owns more than 18% of the company's shares, more than three times the next-largest stockholder. So as Tesla's stock boomed, Musk's net worth exploded by nearly $90 billion this year, catapulting him through the middle of the pack to the top three. In January 2020, Musk's net worth , with half of that wealth composed of Tesla shares, according to Forbes and Bloomberg estimates at the time.
Musk's holding is about to get diluted somewhat: Just one day after the stock split, the company announced plans to sell up to about $5 billion in new shares, according to a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Shares fell about 1% Tuesday.
