Elon Musk has reclaimed his title of being the world’s richest person as Tesla stock prices surged, a Bloomberg report reveals.
Musk was dethroned as the world’s richest person in December 2022 as Tesla shares saw a decline and was replaced by Louis Vuitton CEO Bernard Arnault. However, around two months later, Musk has reclaimed the throne.
Elon Musk becomes world’s richest person again
Musk’s net worth now stands as USD 187 billion. At the beginning of the year, the Twitter owner’s net worth was USD 137 billion. Elon Musk has been the world’s richest person since September 2021. Before him, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos held the spot.
At the beginning of this year, reports had surfaced that Musk had been recognised by Guinness World Records for breaking the world record for losing the most money in history. A press release by the organisation confirmed the same and stated that “Elon Musk has officially broken the world record for the largest loss of personal fortune in history.”
The press release by Guinness World Records also stated that previously, the record was held by Japanese tech investor Masayoshi Son who had lost USD 56 billion. “Although the exact figure is almost impossible to ascertain, Musk’s total losses far surpass the previous record of $58.6 billion, set by Japanese tech investor Masayoshi Son in 2000,” it said.
Musk and Tesla
It is no secret that much of Musk’s personal fortune is tied to Tesla stocks. The entrepreneur was one of the early investors of the company and eventually went on to hold the largest shares in the automobile company. The electric car brand was founded as Tesla Motors in July 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. In 2004, Musk became the largest shareholder of the company by investing a gigantic amount of USD 6.5 million. He then assumed his role as the CEO and product architect of the company in 2008.
Musk had sold large chunks of his Tesla shares in 2022, at first, to buy Twitter, and then perhaps to cope with the losses of his brand-new acquisition.
Musk sold Tesla shares worth a combined value of USD 15.4 billion in April and August 2022. At the time, he had said that there were no ‘further sales planned’. However, in November 2022, Musk sold another 19.5 million Tesla shares worth about USD 4 billion. “Billionaire entrepreneur and Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk sells 19.5 million Tesla shares, a SEC filing shows,” a tweet by Reuters said at the time.
Tesla stocks began plummeting in 2022 and reached their biggest annual decline the same year. In such turbulent times, Musk had reportedly emailed all Tesla employees telling them to not be bothered about the ‘stock market craziness’.
Musk’s Twitter takeover
Musk bought Twitter for USD 44 billion dollar in October 2022. The billionaire introduced several extreme changes at the company after assuming his new role. One of the first things that Musk did after assuming his new role was to fire the company’s then-CEO, Parag Agrawal, along with other top executives. Under Musk’s reign, the majority of Twitter staff has either resigned, or has been laid off. The new Twitter owner had promised after November 2022 that there will be no layoffs in the company going forward. However, since then, several layoffs have been announced.
Before Musk’s takeover, Twitter had around 7,500 employees. However, after the new owner assumed his role, the workforce was reduced to around 2,300 people.
Recent layoffs at Twitter
Recently, reports of a fresh round of layoffs at Twitter had surfaced. As per a report by The New York Times, Musk fired around 10 per cent of the company’s workforce. This means that nearly 200 people lost their jobs as part of the latest layoffs at the company.
The layoffs were announced over the weekend and the people impacted were working on keeping Twitter’s various features online. The report further stated that the monetisation infrastructure team was reduced to fewer than eight people from 30.