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Elon Musk Close To Surpassing Jeff Bezos as World's Richest Person (bloomberg.com) 119

Posted by msmash from the up-next dept.
Elon Musk, the outspoken entrepreneur behind Tesla and SpaceX, kicked off the new year by homing in on a characteristically audacious title: the richest person on the planet. From a report: A 4.9% rally in the electric carmaker's share price Wednesday boosted Musk to within $3 billion of Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, who currently occupies the top spot on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a ranking of the world's 500 wealthiest people. The South Africa-born engineer's net worth was $184.5 billion at 11:40 a.m. in New York, just shy of Bezos, who has held the top spot since October 2017. As chief executive officer of Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, Musk is also a rival to Bezos, owner of Blue Origin, in the private space race. The milestone caps an extraordinary 12 months for Musk. Over the past year his net worth soared by more than $146 billion in possibly the fastest bout of wealth creation in history.
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Elon Musk Close To Surpassing Jeff Bezos as World's Richest Person More

Elon Musk Close To Surpassing Jeff Bezos as World's Richest Person

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  • Bitcoin worth as much as a Tesla Model 3 (Score:3)

    by xack ( 5304745 ) on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @01:32PM (#60903714)
    To give you a perspective on the whole bubble thing going on right now.

  • Bezos is actually a nicer guy (Score:4, Interesting)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @01:38PM (#60903724)

    But Elon gets things done.

    • Re:Bezos is actually a nicer guy (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @02:02PM (#60903786)

      I wouldn't say either are nice or not nice guys. We tend to go off their public show and press releases. With a public CEO it is really difficult to see how much of a good person they really are.

      Both gets things done too. However I give Elon credit for a business that makes something that hasn't been successfully done before. Private Space Ships, and Mass Market electric Cars, that people tend to want to own. And he is willing to weather past the hard times to have it accomplished.

      Amazon was many of the online stores that was available. Bezos did help make it the #1 online store. But if it wasn't for Bazos, we woud still probably have some other large online store where we buy crap. Perhaps eBay would still be #1. Or Walmart would be a bigger player in the online game.

      However for the Electric Car, the traditional automakers just use their designs as a PR Stunt, then have them so underwhelming that little people will buy them. Tesla made a car that had the Range to be useful, and it was faster than most ICE Cars, and they looked like cars, not oversized phisher-price toys.
       

      • Re:Bezos is actually a nicer guy (Score:5, Interesting)

        by rogoshen1 ( 2922505 ) on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @02:20PM (#60903846)

        Musk definitely seems less 'evil' than Bezos. i'm sure both have sociopathic tendencies; but Bezos just comes across as ruthless. Acquire wealth and use it to bully and take over other firms/industries to further generate wealth. His business practices in regards to unions, employee pay, etc etc.

        Musk's wealth is basically speculation on Tesla, so it's not a fair comparison -- but his companies seem to at least be innovative (in the sense of being first to market; not necessarily first to come up with the idea).

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          For both of them, most of their "wealth" isn't actually wealth but speculative confidence. Amazon's P/E is 97, which is not only sky high, but pretty close to Telsa, at 115. Investors are betting hard that both companies are actually going to generate, or at least concentrate, insane amounts of wealth.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

            In case of Amazon, the wealth is already heavily concentrated in the company.

            Tesla, less so. I'd argue that SpaceX is the more promising of the major companies led by Musk.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

              Agreed. I have trouble seeing how Telsa is going to grow into their current valuation. I don't think it's even possible to really estimate the potential of SpaceX.

        • We tend to go off their public show and press releases. With a public CEO it is really difficult to see how much of a good person they really are.

          Musk really doesn't do a great job of keeping the CEO mask on. It's pretty clear he is, at minimum, kind of a dick

          Why does Tesla CEO Elon Musk keep getting himself into a mess? [usatoday.com]
          Elon Musk wipes nearly $15 billion off Tesla's valuation by tweeting that shares are too high [marketwatch.com]
          Report: Elon Musk Is Kind of a Dick [gizmodo.com.au]

          But goshdarnit, he does get a lot done. Amazon

          • definitely. and if i'm being honest (and incredibly selfish) musk could genocide kittens around the world, and i'd still be okay with him due to starlink.
            okay not literally, but starlink / tesla make the world a better place, as long as you aren't an oil baron or astronomer i suppose.
            Whereas amazon is the corporate manifestation of the 'race to the bottom'. The flak that Walmart used to get for destroying main street should be heaped on Amazon a thousand fold.
            Being slashdot, i know it's an unpopular opinion

        • Yes, I agree... at leas Musk means well... in his misguided ways.
          And he has fun ... even if 'not suitable' to some not very natural or healthy social norms (like political correctness).

          He's still fake and dislikabe of course. But no almost-literal Lex Luthor from Planet Bezos. ;)

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Luthair ( 847766 )
          I dunno, Bezos we hear almost nothing from so its hard to really quantify him as a person. Musk however we can see from his public persona is a complete asshole much like Steve Jobs was.

      • My angle on this would be "What is the corporate focus?" I've even been trying to replace light bulb jokes with "All your..." jokes about various foci. Below are a few recent examples, but I really can't figure out what to focus on as regards Elon Musk.

        Zero WIng
        "All your base are belong to us."
        Amazon
        "All your shoppings is belong to us."
        Apple
        "All your sexy toy are belong to us."
        Google
        "All your

      • the "private space ships" is mostly him soaking up gov't research and contracts. As for the cars, the auto makers sat on it and he moved, so I guess there's that. But the tech was already there (and nearly all of it came out of Universities paid for by you and me). That said I'll give him credit for actually doing it, similar to how Apple made a Smart phone for America when the carriers were blocking all efforts to release them here.

        As for Bezos, he was just the most ruthless. He relentlessly kept price

  • Lets see how much worth there really is if its all cashed out.

    • 2021 seems like it may be a good year for Tesla.
      They expect to have completed 3 more Giga Factories (China, Germany and Texas) which will pump out a lot more cars. Their Self Driving Beta is showing a large improvement in its ability over what is non-beta now. While they are other electric cars from more traditional auto makers (or from auto-makers who made an offshoot and pretended to be a startup) which are starting to look really good, they are still going to be compared to Tesla, and trying to ramp u

    • Lets see how much worth there really is if its all cashed out.

      It never will be because he could never spend it all. Even if he only cashed out a few hundred million he'd be able to live off the interest.

    • The thing is, he doesn't want or need to cash out, he'll want to transfer some of that wealth to fund thing at SpaceX at some point, but there might be other ways to do that.

      But there's really no need for Musk to reduce his control over Tesla when he can have all his expenses covered by borrowing against a minuscule percentage of his shares.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        SpaceX probably doesn't need much, at least not at the moment. It's out of its biggest money eating phase. Now it's busy eating the space launch market with much lower costs than any of its competitors, making excellent progress in reducing those costs by another unbelievable amount, and starting up another potentially highly profitable ISP arm.

        In five or ten years Musk might want to start raiding the Tesla piggybank to fund a Mars base.

  • The only people whose name you know that are on that list are Elizabeth Windsor, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin.

  • "Wealth Creation" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ThosLives ( 686517 ) on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @01:58PM (#60903776) Journal

    ...in possibly the fastest bout of wealth creation in history.

    Has education failed so badly that this idea is still perpetuated? Market cap is not wealth.

    • Also, currency is not wealth.

      Wealth is the consumption of goods and services. The top million or so "wealthiest folks" are all about equally as wealthy, in spite of the orders of magnitude difference in their "wealth" as measured by the bean counters, who arent counting wealth.

      Sure, private planes, mansions, and sports cars distinguish the "ultra wealthy" from everyday folk, but they use the same cell phones and desktops, drink the same coffee, even eat the same food, and everyone gets to wear clean clo

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      In modern financial system, where one can choose to leverage such stock, or even use them as bonds in various insurance schemes, they actually do represent wealth.

      A better question is if this sort of wealth is worth having in existence, because it tends to be highly unstable.

      • No, even with leverage, it's still not wealth. The sibling post to yours explains it - money is not wealth. You can use money to buy wealth, and you can get people to give you money if you have lots of highly valued stock, but you aren't wealthy until you use that money to buy wealth.

        The proof is simple: when you suddenly create $100B of stock value on paper, the amount of goods and services in the world didn't change - no wealth was created. The converse is true of stock crashes: when price x float of a

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          All wealth is simply a matter of trust. Money and other forms of currency are merely a vehicle for numerating said trust. In this regard, this wealth is no different. As long as people trust in it, it will remain just as real and usable as any other wealth that enjoys similar levels of trust.

      • And highy pointless, in the grand scheme of humanity.

        And I certainly won't accept it as payment for my *actual work*.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          Really? You'd break law and not accept legal tender to settle debt in form of money that is paid to you from the bank that leveraged stock to create that money as a loan to someone who bought your work?

          Again, this is actual wealth, and it can actually to used to create legal tender through a long financial operation chain. That is not in question. The question is whether this wealth is worth being created the way it is, because of how unstable it is. Because this is how you get sub-prime.

  • If anyone deserves it he does.

  • If Musk just works a bit harder, maybe getting up 10 minutes earlier each day, he should be able to pull it off.

    • Maybe if he had worked instead of spending his time trying and faiing to minimise the problem of Corona...

      I am glad he'd doing what he does though, and I do enjoy his non-conspiracy theory tweets.

  • Elon is a bug in the matrix (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ti-coune ( 837201 ) on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @02:41PM (#60903908)
    Even if Elon were to die today, he already did much more for the planet than Bezos could ever do in his whole life. Elon is an anomaly in the world of business people. Nobody was expecting him. The Bezos type was expected, there are many like him, he just happens to be one of the richest. There were many before him, there will be many after him. But Elon is just an exception, a bug in the matrix. If only we could find out how to reproduce this bug.

    • He is an immigrant.
      Time to admit more people to America simply because they are clever.

    • While I have an immense admiration for what Musk achieved, one should keep in mind the associated human cost. I would not work in his companies, for any price.

  • This isn't actual money they can use.
    Sure, it helps them raise capital for their companies, but if Bezos or Musk tried to cash out, these numbers would translate into nothing like this amount of actual currency in the bank
    .

  • The PE ratio is around 1400 (less than 100 could be considered poor), so obviously investors are betting on future value. The problem is tesla would have to hit it out of the park for the next 5 years with no problems and no competitors to justify this value.

    Any bad news will tank the stock.

  • along with the rest of the billionaires.

  • The person that *actually* improves the world the most.
    That doesn't mean driving it in and insane direction that definitely is the wisest choice *inside* the box of cancerous things that have been accepted as normal.
    So definitely not Musk or Zombie Jobs or Trump Or Zombie Kim-Yong Il.
    And of course not being just plain evil.
    So Darth Bezos the dual-wielder is right out.

  • Goals (Score:3)

    by Thelasko ( 1196535 ) on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @03:02PM (#60903980) Journal
    Musk doesn't want to be the richest person in the world. He wants to be the richest person in the solar system.

  • The amount of money given by the wealthy plummeted in 2020 from past years, even while their wealth soared [observer.com]. While Bezos promised to give $10 billion for his Bezos Earth Fund, the next nine donors gave a total of $2.6 billion to charity, the lowest level since 2011.

    Despite gaining $118 billion from March to December, $3 billion from Tesla stock options alone, Elon Musk gave $0.

    • Elon Musk gave $0.

      That you know of. ...While cutting carbon by more than anyone else. ...And entertaining space nerds like me more than anyone else.

  • Net Worth isn't wealth (Score:3)

    by Whateverthisis ( 7004192 ) on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @04:37PM (#60904272)
    In an accounting perspective, Musk will be. But the same thing that makes him wealthy is also a trap: the wealth comes in ownership of Tesla. If he sells his shares, he starts losing control of the company, and more to the point his role is so central to Tesla that if he started selling shares, he has to first announce it to the public markets beforehand, which would worry the markets about Tesla and others would start selling. So all that stock that makes him worth so much is only valuable as long as it's stock.

    It may seem like a pedantic distinction, but the implication of wealth is that they have the options available to them that money can bring. Stock does not provide options, cash does.

    Gates is still the biggest in my opinion, because something like 50% if his net worth is now in liquid assets. He's free to pursue things that interest him no matter the cost, like fusion power (https://www.rechargenews.com/transition/bill-gates-backed-nuclear-fusion-pioneer-we-can-fill-the-gaps-left-by-wind-and-solar/2-1-887576) and vaccine distribution to poor countries (https://www.wired.com/story/the-wild-logistical-ride-of-the-ebola-vaccines-high-tech-thermos/). Musk is stuck with his shares, and frankly so is Bezos.

    • I have no idea if you will see this - and you shouldn't really care - but, damn, that was both interesting and thought-provoking. The kind of comment lowly readers such as I who never comment hope to come across

      • Sure, glad you found it interesting. It's a strange distinction that many people don't appreciate. I used to be a financial advisor, and it's somewhere around $5M to $10M net worth when the definition of what that means is not what the average person thinks. But it's important to understand, because of all the conversation around the wealth gap and the whole "Top 1%" and "paying fair share in taxes" none of it really makes sense because the way that wealthy people view money is different than how the ave

  • And he's there!

    You just have to find gulible rubes with lots of money to burn.

    *Coughs in Richard Branson*

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