October 17, (THEWILL) –Â Elon Musk’s net worth has surpassed $230 billion, making him the richest man on the planet after shares at SpaceX soared by 33 percent.
After only joining the Forbes top ten billionaire list in the middle of last year, the Tesla CEO has now outstripped former richest person, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and is currently wealthier than Bill Gates and Warren Buffett combined.
The Tesla founder saw his and his SpaceX company’s wealth swell after a share sale at SpaceX on October 8 worth $100 billion in a secondary offering.
The company had an agreement with both new and existing investors to sell up to $755 million in SpaceX stock from insiders at $560 per share, multiple people close to the deal told CNBC.
The 33 percent increase in its new share price brings the company’s valuation to $100.3 billion, after initially offering the deal to investors in February, when SpaceX’s valuation stood at $74 billion at 419.19 a share.
The first round of offerings raised nearly $1.2 billion, the outlet reports.
The company’s new increased valuation places it in the rare company of a private ‘centicorn’ or ‘hectocorn,’ which are companies with a valuation of $100 billion.
Forbes Real-Time Top Ten Billionaires List
Jeff Bezos -$197 billion
Bernard Arnault and family – $185 billion
Bill Gates – $132 billion
Mark Zuckerberg –Â $116 billion
Larry Ellison – $125 billion
Larry Page – $120.9 billion
Sergey Brin – $116.2 billion
Warren Buffett – $103.1 billion
Mukesh Ambani – $102.2 billion
According to Forbes Real-Time Billionaires List as of October 17, 2021
SpaceX is now the second-most valuable private company worldwide behind only China’s Bytedance, according to CB Insights.
That’s a far cry from just over a year ago, when Musk didn’t even make Forbes top ten billionaires list, which Bezos dominated at number one with a then-net worth of $113 billion.
The SpaceX founder was quick to boast about taking the number one spot on the rich list, tweeting a second place medal at Bezos after the Blue Origin and Amazon founder shared some motivational words about his company.
Bezos had previously held the title of world’s richest person at $197.8 billion as of 2021, after the pandemic and lockdowns saw a boom in online sales.
In April of this year, Musk pledged to give away $150 million, including a $100 million prize in a carbon removal contest, where the billionaire asked participants to create workable solutions for reducing the planet’s CO2 emissions at scale in a ‘durable and sustainable way.’
The contest started on Earth Day and will run for four years, ending on Earth Day 2025, or April 22, 2025.
Since beginning that contest in April, his wealth has increased by around $60 billion, with Bloomberg reporting that the SpaceX deal alone added $11 billion to Musk’s net worth.
The 50-year-old began his career co-founding PayPal before moving on to found SpaceX and Tesla Motors in the early 2000s.
Musk has seen his own net worth soar thanks to Tesla and SpaceX’s rising valuations, with the latter having raised billions in an effort to fund two capital-intensive projects, Starlink and Starship.
Starlink is a satellite internet constellation operated by SpaceX providing satellite Internet access to most of the Earth, while Starship is a fully reusable launch system currently in development.
SpaceX has already launched 1,740 Starlink satellites to date, currently providing an internet network to over 100,000 users in 14 different countries who are a part of the project’s public beta, with service priced at $99 a month.
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