Elon Musk’s current net worth is $189.7 billion and he is now the richest person in the world at fifty years old according to Forbes. He overtook Jeff Bezos top rank last week. Musk’s net worth has grown by over $166 billion over the past year due to the Tesla stock price. He is one of the greatest technology entrepreneurs of all time based on equity returns and his personal net worth ranking.
Here is his response he tweeted when congratulated for this accomplishment.
Looking back over his entrepreneurial career his first big win was as the co-founder of Zip2, a web software company, which was acquired by Compaq for $340 million in 1999. Musk made $22 million from his 7% share of Zip2 in the acquisition sale.
He took $10 million of the capital he received from that sale of Zip2 and invested it for his next big start up win as as the co-founder of PayPal which was acquired by Ebay for $1.5 billion in 2002. Ebay bought it to integrate into their website so buyers and sellers could easily interact directly.
With the $180 million Musk received from selling his 11.7% stake in PayPal to eBay he then invested it all in SpaceX, Tesla, and Solar City as he believed that space travel, electric cars, and the solar power industry were the future.
“My proceeds from the PayPal acquisition were $180 million. I put $100 million in SpaceX, $70m in Tesla, and $10m in Solar City. I had to borrow money for rent.” – Elon Musk
He was very busy as the founder and CEO of SpaceX, co-founder of Tesla, Inc., and he also acted as the chairman and help start Solar City which was later acquired by Tesla.
Musk says he owns just one publicly traded stock, his own. He holds approximately 38.6 million shares of Tesla according to SEC filings which is about 20% of the company. Tesla stock gained +743% in 2020 and dramatically increased Musk’s net worth making him richer than anyone but Jeff Bezos in 2021.
Elon Musk currently has a 54% stake in SpaceX as it is valued at $46 billion
Musk was a key Angel Investor that helped launch an artificial intelligence company DeepMind Technologies in 2010. The company sold to Google for a reported price of $400 to $600 million.
He is also the co-founder of Neuralink; founder of The Boring Company, and co-founder of OpenAI.
Bloomberg reports that private investors value the Boring Company at about $920 million based on its funding rounds. Elon Musk owns 90% of the equity in the Boring Company.
Microsoft invested $1 billion in his company OpenAI to support the building of artificial intelligence.
Neuralink, his brain computing startup has raised $66.27 million in venture funding so far, according to Pitchbook, which sets the startup’s valuation at $509.3 million.
Elon Musk’s wealth was built through the founding of innovative tech companies that changed what was possible in the present through advancing technology. Elon Musk continually takes his money from his big wins and puts it into bigger and more difficult business ventures. He is an entrepreneur and innovator with incredible energy and mental curiosity, it will be interesting to see how all his ventures play out over time.
