The surge in his wealth comes as his shares and stocks in the iconic Tesla brand added a further ￡24billion onto his bank account. The recent increase further extends the gap between and the next richest man, Amazon's Jeff Bezos.
In spite of Mr Bezos leading one of the world’s richest and most successful online shopping outlets, as well as funding the Blue Origin project, which directly competes with Mr Musk’s SpaceX, the second richest man sees his wealth stand at a “mere” ￡143billion.
According to Forbes, Tesla’s stock value jumped after it announced it had delivered more than 936,000 cars in 2021.
That beat analysts’ expectations and propelled Musk further up the rich list.
Mr Musk personally owns just over 15 percent of the car-making company stocks.
He also runs a private space company and is fixing to build a global internet solution and underground tunnelling system – so there are plenty of slices of pie that add up to his overall wealth.
Some reports suggest that the Tesla boss could be the world’s first trillionaire.
Starlink, his satellite-delivered global internet system, could be what gets him there.
Mr Musk now controls more than a third of all active satellites in orbit as SpaceX broke its own record for the number of rocket launches in a calendar year in 2021.
According to an October report by Morgan Stanley, Starlink might make the world’s richest man even richer.
The report valued the private SpaceX at $100billion, mainly driven by innovations within Starlink.
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The Morgan Stanley report said: “We have long seen SpaceX as multiple companies in one but the largest contributor to our estimated $100billion base case valuation for the company ($200billion bull case) is the Starlink LEO sat comms business which has had a number of important milestones in recent months.”
Despite Musk’s protestations about not wanting to be labelled a billionaire and selling all his material possessions – it seems like he’s set to be leading the rich list for quite some time to come.
In fact, the time it takes Elon to earn what the average UK worker takes home in a year is just 1 minute and 47 seconds.
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The current list of the world’s richest people, as compiled by Bloomberg is as follows:
Elon Musk / $300bn – Tesla, Spacex
Jeff Bezos / $193bn – Amazon, Blue Origin
Bernard Arnault / $180bn - LVMH
Bill Gates / $138bn - Microsoft
Larry Page / $128bn - Google
Mark Zuckerberg / $126bn - META
Sergey Brin / $123bn - Google
Steve Ballmer / $117bn - Microsoft
Warren Buffett / $112bn – Berkshire Hathaway
Larry Ellison / $110bn – Oracle
Britain’s richest person is Sir Leonard Blavatnik, an investment and music media mogul who sits on a healthy ￡23billion.
However, there is a global critique of individuals holding such wealth.
An Oxfam report in 2019 said: “The 26 richest people on earth in 2018 had the same net worth as the poorest half of the world’s population, some 3.8 billion people.”
The report also claims that 2,200 billionaires worldwide saw their wealth grow by 12 percent, even as the poorest half saw its wealth fall by 11 percent.
Last year, a report by the United Nations Food Programme suggested that with $6bn, the foundation could end world hunger.
Questioning the feasibility of the announcement, Mr Musk promised to fund the entire sum should the UN be able to prove its figures.
To date, no evidence has come forward.