Elon Musk has a net worth of around $206 billion, according to estimates by Bloomberg.
But the tech mogul's wealth comes from a number of sources and it isn't stable. Musk is still the world's richest person, but other billionaires are close on his heels, too: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' net worth is currently $11 billion below Musk's, while luxury-goods mogul Bernard Arnault is $4 billion behind Bezos.
How has Musk's net worth changed over time?
Musk, who was born in South Africa, moved to Canada, and dropped out of a Ph.D at Stanford, became a millionaire before he hit 30. Musk started Zip2, a website that provided city travel guides to newspapers, with his brother Kimbal Musk, and sold it to Compaq for more than $300 million in 1999. Musk, then aged 27, is believed to have got $22 million from the deal.
He went on to cofound online bank X.com in 1999. It soon merged with Peter Thiel's Confinity to become PayPal, and the company was bought for $1.5 billion by eBay in 2002. Despite having been ousted as CEO, Musk walked away with around $165 million.
Musk cofounded space-exploration company SpaceX in 2002. In 2004, he became an investor in and chairman of EV company Tesla. During the financial crisis in 2008, he saved Tesla from bankruptcy with a $40 million investment and a $40 million loan. That same year, he was named Tesla's CEO.
Musk said 2008 was "the worst year of my life." Alongside problems in his personal life, Tesla kept losing money and SpaceX was having trouble launching the first version of its Falcon rocket. By 2009, Musk was living off personal loans.
But Tesla went public in 2010, and Musk's estimated net worth steadily climbed. In 2012 he debuted on Forbes' Billionaires List with an estimated wealth of $2 billion.
Related stories
In 2016, Musk set up tunnel-digging business the Boring Company. The next year, he founded neurotechnology startup Neuralink.
Advertisem*nt
Musk's net worth began a rapid ascent at the start of the pandemic as Tesla shares soared. Musk started 2020 with an estimated net worth of just under $30 billion and was worth around $170 billion just a year later – a more than five-fold increase in just a year. His estimated fortune peaked at around $340 billion in November 2021.
But it's tumbled since then: Tesla stock was down 56% by the end of January 2024, slashing the company's value from over $1.2 trillion to below $600 billion.
Musk also bought Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022, serving as its CEO until he stood down in early June 2023.
Where does Musk's fortune come from?
Musk's wealth is largely dependent on Tesla shares. Though he takes nosalary from Tesla,he's awarded stock options when the company hits challenging performance metrics.
Advertisem*nt
"Elon will receive no guaranteed compensation of any kind — no salary, no cash bonuses, and no equity that vests simply by the passage of time," Tesla said in 2018 when the company announced a 10-year performance award for Musk. "Instead, Elon's only compensation will be a 100% at-risk performance award, which ensures that he will be compensated only if Tesla and all of its shareholders do extraordinarily well."
According to Bloomberg, close to half of Musk's net worth comes from Tesla shares, while just over 20% comes from SpaceX stock. The rest of his wealth comes from shares in Twitterand The Boring Company, as well as other miscellaneous liabilities.
How does Musk stack up to other billionaires?
Musk frequently trades places with other billionaires for the title of world's richest person.
As things currently stand, there's an $11-billion gap between Musk and the world's second-richest person, Bezos, whose net worth Bloomberg puts at $195 billion.
Advertisem*nt
Rounding off the top five are Arnault, at $191 billion; Facebook founder and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, at $169 billion; and Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, at $146 billion.
