Elon Musk passes Jeff Bezos to become the richest person on Earth

The billionaire CEO’s stock stash continues to grow, especially after he signed a major 10-year compensation package with the company in 2018 that further tied his earnings to Tesla’s stock price and revenue goals. He is awarded a raft of company stock options every time a new milestone is hit; the first tranche, which he received earlier this year, was worth some $800 million.

Like most billionaires, Musk has only seen his overall wealth increase during the coronavirus pandemic. But unlike that peer group, Musk claimed in court to be “cash poor” and “financially illiquid” in 2019 and said last year that he would sell “almost all physical possessions,” including his mansions. He takes loans against the stock that makes him so wealthy and plows that money back into his companies, like when he dumped around $100 million into The Boring Company in 2018. Musk has a long history of using his own personal wealth to fund new endeavors, too, as he funded Tesla and SpaceX after becoming a millionaire running Zip2 and PayPal.

Musk may now be the richest man on Earth by the standards of money-focused outlets like Bloomberg and Forbes, though they tend to focus on calculating knowable assets. However, authoritarian leaders like Vladimir Putin and Mohammed bin Salman are both extremely personally wealthy in ways that are harder to calculate and also have unchallengeable access to the vast wealth of their nations.