Elon Musk Passes Bill Gates To Become World’s 2nd-Richest Person

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk gestures as he arrives to visit the construction site of a future Tesla plant near Berlin on Sept. 3. Musk is now the world’s second-richest person, according to Bloomberg.

Odd Andersen/AFP via Getty Images

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Odd Andersen/AFP via Getty Images

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Bloomberg reports that the Tesla CEO has added more than $100 billion to his net worth in 2020, propelling him from the 35th spot on the Billionaires Index up to No. 2.

Most of Musk’s wealth is tied up in Tesla stock. Instead of drawing a salary, he has been compensated in stock based on the company’s performance — a decision that has paid off handsomely for him so far. Tesla stock has repeatedly defied skeptics and pushed to stratospheric heights.

So far, Musk has received four of the 12 bonuses negotiated in his executive compensation package.

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After some production challenges, Tesla has massively scaled up its output of electric cars, which have proved popular — the Model 3 is the best-selling luxury car in America. And Wall Street is feeling very optimistic about the future of electric vehicles and clean energy as companies and governments around the world propose increasingly meaningful actions to tackle climate change.

Tesla stock also received a bump from the news that the S&P 500 would be adding the company to its influential index. And the stock market as a whole is surging on Tuesday — with the Dow Jones Industrial Index topping 30,000 points for the first time — as vaccine hopes and signs that Trump will comply with the results of the presidential election both raise expectations for 2021.

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Musk recently announced on Twitter he had a mild case of COVID-19, which was inconclusively indicated through rapid tests and confirmed through more reliable PCR tests.