THANKS to a blowout earnings report and a big car order by Hertz, Tesla’s market cap surpassed US$1 trillion Monday — and its CEO Elon Musk has emerged as the richest person in the history of the world.

Forbes estimates Musk’s net worth to be US$271.3 billion as of the market’s close Monday — up some US$41.7 billion from Oct. 22’s close. For that, he can thank a nearly 13-percent jump in Tesla stock plus more than 16 million new stock options, worth US$16.1 billion, awarded following Tesla’s latest earnings report.

The list of the five richest people in the world also includes Amazon’s founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos, French group LVMH’s general manager Bernard Arnault, Microsoft mogul Bill Gates and director of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg.

Musk is in uncharted territory, headed toward US$300 billion. For comparison, Bezos became the richest person to ever appear on The Forbes 400 ranking of America’s richest people earlier this month, topping the list with an estimated US$201 billion fortune. His net worth climbed as high as US$212 billion when Amazon’s stock peaked in July — a full US$59.3 billion less than Musk is worth now. Gates briefly surpassed US$100 billion in April 1999, during the dot-com bubble’s apex. Adjusted for inflation, that’s just over US$165 billion today.

When Forbes first began tracking billionaire wealth, in 1982, the richest person in America was shipping magnate Daniel Ludwig, worth US$2 billion, or about US$5.5 billion in today’s dollars.

Musk’s 23 percent stake in Tesla (discounted for loan obligations) constitutes the bulk of his fortune, but he also holds a minority stake in the privately held rocket company he founded in 2002, SpaceX. The business was most recently valued by investors at US$74 billion, following a February funding round.

You won’t find much real estate or many other valuable assets in Musk’s portfolio. Despite his remarkable wealth, the billionaire has been leading a relatively austere lifestyle.

In the spring of 2020, he pledged to ditch the bulk of his physical possessions, including a half-dozen California mansions.

As of June, Musk’s primary residence was a “foldable, prefabricated” rental house, the size of a studio apartment, in Boca Chica, Texas, where SpaceX produces its Starships.

His net worth has soared to new heights as politicians have taken aim at billionaire wealth. On Monday, he decried the latest tax proposals that Democrats hope could help finance their spending plan, which would reportedly require billionaires and those who earn income exceeding US$100 million for at least three consecutive years to pay taxes annually on the increased values of their stocks and bonds. That would be particularly onerous for Musk, who holds much of his vast fortune in Tesla’s publicly traded shares.

Musk was born in South Africa in 1971 to a South African father who was an engineer and a Canadian mother who was a nutritionist. Growing up, he spent most of his time reading and tinkering with projects when not in school and when his nany was not watching him.

He started learning computer programming at the age of 10 and displayed an early talent for computers and entrepreneurship. At the age of 12, he created a video game he called Blaster and sold it to a computer magazine. In 1988, after obtaining a Canadian passport, Musk left South Africa because he was unwilling to support apartheid through compulsory military service.

After attending university for just five months in South Africa, Elon decided to move to Canada to attend Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. But he didn’t finish his schooling there. After just two years, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, the United States, to finish his schooling. But getting through college wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. Musk had to strive to make his way through. He financed his college education through a combination of scholarships, getting loans, and having to work two different jobs at the same time. Fortunately, his sacrifice eventually paid off, earning himself a degree in economics and another in physics in 1997.

After these two educational accomplishments, he enrolled in graduate school in physics at Stanford University in California. But he left after only two days because he felt that the internet had much more potential to change society than work in physics. In 1995, he founded Zip2, a company that provided maps and business directories to online newspapers.

The company took time to get off the ground, and in the interim, Musk struggled financially. Things got so bad for Musk at one point that the only bed he could afford was the couch in their startup’s office, and the shower and restroom facilities at his local YMCA, a leading nonprofit committed to strengthening individuals and communities.

Despite the low times of this endeavor, however, they eventually found angel investors who backed the company, and clients within the city, and various big- name news publishing companies like the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune who saw promise in the company and its useful city guide mapping software. From this point, it was only a matter of time before they were able to sell the company to the computer manufacturer Compaq for US$307 million in 1999.

After selling the company, Musk earned a US$22 million windfall and went on to invest the bulk of that money into his next venture, which was a financial services company he co-founded called X.com. And three years later, merging it with PayPal.com, they sold it off to the online auction eBay for US$1.5 billion in 2002.

With the acquisition of PayPal.com, Musk’s net worth grew to be US$123 million. Now, at this point he could’ve retired early, rode off into the sunset and lived happily ever after. But that’s not how legends are made. Instead, he took a huge gamble and invested into two separate companies.

One of them was Tesla Motors, a fledgling automaker focused on electric transportation, and the other was SpaceX, a company hellbent on commercial space exploration.

In 2002, Musk launched his most ambitious project, SpaceX. The entrepreneur, inspired by one of the main messages of science fiction, decided to develop spaceships that would enable humanity to conquer space. Since its first significant advance in 2008, when the world’s first privately developed launch system Falcon 1 reached orbit, the company has significantly improved its space technology.

In 2008 Musk joined Tesla, an electric car manufacturer from California. At Tesla, Musk has had a US$1 salary since 2014.

In 2018, after his controversial tweet about the possibility of making Tesla private, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission fined Musk and Tesla US$20 million each and forced him to resign as a chairman while remaining Tesla’s CEO. However, Musk later claimed he never regretted that tweet.

He founded The Boring Company in 2016, a tunnel-digging startup, and a neurotechnology firm Neuralink, which announced in 2019 it was ready to install first brain-reading chips to a human patient by 2020.

Though Musk has previously vowed to “own no house” and last year said he planned to sell off nearly all of his physical possessions, the world’s richest man has still managed to spend some of his fortune.

In a 2013 Sotheby’s auction, Musk paid nearly US$1 million on a rare 1976 Lotus Esprit sports car that was used in the filming of the 1977 James Bond film “The Spy Who Loved Me.”

His stable of cars also reportedly includes a 1920 Ford Model T and a Jaguar Series 1 1967 E-type Roadster.

Marvel’s Tony Stark, as played by Robert John Downey Jr., is rumored to be inspired by Musk. He even had a cameo in “Iron Man 2.”

Musk, in turn, seems to be a massive fan of Marvel. He once admitted he named his son Xavier in honor of Professor Xavier from “X-Men.”

(SD-Agencies)