Elon Musk regains his spot as the world's richest person
Elon Musk has reclaimed the title of the richest person in the world after briefly losing the title to France's Bernard Arnault.
Musk, the chief of companies including Tesla and Twitter, now has a net worth of $187.1 billion, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index published on Monday, just topping the $185.3 billion fortune of Arnault,the 73-year-old French tycoon behind luxury-goods powerhouse LVMH.
Musk's wealth has been buoyed by a nearly 70% surge in Tesla Inc.'s stock price this year. It's up about 100% from its intraday low on 6 January as investors pile back into bets on riskier growth stocks amid signs of economic strength and a slower pace of Federal Reserve interest-rate increases, reports Bloomberg.
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The company has also benefited from more demand for its electric vehicles after cutting prices on several models.
Musk, 51, entered 2023 with a net worth of $137 billion, becoming the first person ever to lose $200 billion from their fortune and raising the prospect that he might struggle to reclaim his title as the world's richest individual. He was displaced atop Bloomberg's wealth index for more than two months after a steep slide in Tesla, where he's chief executive officer.
Donations Musk made late last year didn't make much of a dent in his net worth. He gave 11.6 million Tesla shares to unnamed charitable causes between August and December, according to a disclosure in February. The stock was worth about $1.9 billion, based on closing prices on the days it was donated.
Tesla investors had been concerned that he was devoting too much of his attention to Twitter, which he acquired in October, at the same time that his electric carmaker was facing heightened competition across the industry. Musk said in December he plans to resign from his post at the social-media platform once he finds someone "foolish" enough to take the job.
He said this month that he may need until the end of the year to stabilize Twitter's finances before handing off to a new CEO.
Tesla's gains have far outpaced the rally in the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 Index, which is up about 10% in 2023. This year has included occasional bursts of speculative trading manias among retail traders — and Tesla is a favorite among that group.
