Elon Musk displaces Bill Gates as second world’s richest man

South African-born billionaire entrepreneur, Elon Musk, has overtaken Bill Gates as the second richest person in the world, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

This is coming few weeks after Musk overtook Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg to become the third-richest.

However, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, remains number one in the rankings.

Musk ranked 35th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index in January but his wealth soared after his electric car company Tesla was selected to join the S&P 500.

Having failed to make the cut in September, Tesla will enter the S&P 500, a stock market index that measures the performance of 500 large companies listed on the US stock exchange, on December 21.

Musk’s net worth soared from $7.2 billion to $127.9 billion, driven by a surge in Tesla’s share price.

Just in 2020 alone Musk has seen his fortune grow by $100.3 billion.

About three-quarters of Musk’s net worth is comprised of Tesla shares

Here is the standings according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index

1 Jeff Bezos $182B Amazon.com

2 Elon R Musk $128B Tesla / Space X

3 Bill Gates $128B Microsoft

4 Bernard Arnault $105B LVMH Moët Hennessy – Louis Vuitton

5 Mark Zuckerberg $102B Facebook

6 Warren Buffett $86.8B Berkshire Hathaway

7 Larry Page $81.3B Google co-founder

8 Sergey Brin $78.7B Google co-founder

9 Steve Ballmer $76.1B Microsoft

10 Mukesh Ambani $74.0B India Energy