Here are some of the richest people in the world as of November 11th, 2023.
1. Elon Musk, $227.1 billion
Elon Musk co-founded six companies, including electric car company Tesla, rocket maker SpaceX and tunneling startup Boring Company.
Musk owns a 21 percent stake in Tesla (stocks and options), but has pledged more than half of his shares as collateral for personal loans of up to $3.5 billion.
SpaceX, founded in 2002, is worth nearly $150 billion after a $750 million tender offer in June 2023. It has nearly quintupled its value in four years.
The Boring Company, which offers transportation solutions, raised $675 million in new funding in April 2022, valuing it at $5.7 billion.
In April 2022, Twitter’s board of directors agreed to sell the company to Musk for $44 billion, after he disclosed a 9.1 percent stake and the threat of a hostile takeover.
The deal closed in October 2022 after Musk tried to back out and Twitter filed a lawsuit. Musk is estimated to own 74% of the company, now called X.
He was born in South Africa and moved to Canada before his 18th birthday. He received a degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania. In 2000, he merged his online bank X.com with a similar platform co-founded by Peter Thiel to form PayPal, which was bought by eBay in 2002 for $1.4 billion. In the same year, Musk founded SpaceX in the city of El Segundo near Los Angeles, and two years later he joined Tesla as an investor and chairman of the board.
The company Tesla was founded a year earlier, and Musk was later given the status of co-founder. He went public with Tesla in 2010, two years after becoming CEO. The market capitalization grew dramatically during 2020 and 2021. In September 2021, Musk became the richest man in the world, and in November of the same year, his wealth reached its peak: $320 billion.
2. Bernard Arnault and his family, $181.9 billion
Bernard Arnault is the CEO and Chairman of LVMH, the largest luxury goods company in the world that includes 75 fashion and beauty brands, including Louis Vuitton and Sephora.
In 2021, LVMH also bought the famous American jewelry store Tiffany & Co. for $15.8 billion, considered the largest luxury brand acquisition ever recorded.
Arnault’s father made a small fortune in construction. In his entrepreneurial beginnings, Arnault used his father’s $15 million to buy the Christian Dior company in 1984.
Arnault has five children, all of whom work at LVMH.
Arnault was at the head of the Forbes list of the richest for almost the entire first half of this year, and in June he fell to second place.
3. Jeff Bezos, $166.2 billion
Jeff Bezos founded e-commerce giant Amazon in 1994 in his garage in Seattle.
In June 2021, he stepped down as CEO of Amazon. He owns a little less than ten percent of that company’s shares.
He and his wife, MacKenzie, divorced in 2019 after 25 years of marriage, and he transferred a quarter of his then 16 percent stake in Amazon to her.
Bezos donated more than $400 million worth of stock to nonprofits in 2022, though it’s unclear which organizations received the stock.
He owns The Washington Post and Blue Origin, a rocket company, and briefly flew into space in one of them in July 2021.
Bezos said in an interview with CNN in November 2022 that he plans to donate most of his wealth during his lifetime, without revealing specific details.
Bezos became the richest man in the world in July 2017, overtaking Bill Gates. He and Gates alternated at the top spot for a while: Bezos held the top spot from 2018 to 2021, dropping to second place in 2022. Since then, he’s fallen as far as fourth place but returned to third place at the end of January this year when the wealth of Indian Gautam Adani (previously the third richest) fell, Forbes reports.
Illustration: Detektor
E. Dz.
