Elon Musk: The Richest Man in the World

In January 2021, Elon Musk officially became the world’s richest man when he surpassed Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who had been the previous richest man in the world since 2017. BBC News reported that the entrepreneur has an estimated net worth of $185 billion as opposed to Bezos with his net worth of $184 billion. 

Elon Musk began his start to becoming a billionaire when he dropped out of Stanford in the 90s to start up a few companies. Dan Blystone of Investopedia talks about the rise to Musk’s success when he first launched Zip2 as a co-founder. Zip2 was an online guide for newspapers, but it was sold in 1999. Musk gained an estimated 22 million from this sale which allowed him to generate new companies. He founded X.com one of the first online banking systems that was protected and insured. Later, Confinity and X.com merged and became Paypal. This led eBay to buy Paypal for $1.5 billion. From this, Musk obtained $180 million.

When 2012 rolled around, Musk founded SpaceX. This company focuses on finding cost effective ways to travel to space as well as aerospace manufacturing. Another goal of SpaceX according to Kate Duffy of Business Insider is to one day colonize Mars. SpaceX currently has a valuation of $46 billion, which helped Musk’s wealth gain. According to CNBC, Musk is highly confident SpaceX will stick around and generate even more success.