Elon Musk surpasses Amazon's Jeff Bezos to become the world's richest person: Report

Chief Executive Officer of Tesla Inc. and SpaceX surpassed Jeff Bezos to become the richest man on earth, according to Bloomberg News. As of yesterday, including Thursday's gains in Tesla shares, Elon Musk officially had a net worth of CAD $238.7 billion, CAD $1.9 billion more than Jeff Bezos.

Musk’s personal wealth has been boosted by last year’s more than eight-fold surge in the shares of Tesla, which became the world’s most valuable carmaker. He has a 20-per-cent stake in the carmaker and about US$42 billion of unrealized paper gains on vested stock options, according to the Bloomberg report.

Tesla shares were up as much as 7.4 percent on Thursday at a record high of US$811.61.

The Forbes Billionaires List, however, said Musk still trails Amazon’s Bezos by US$7.8 billion.

Musk, who co-founded and sold Internet payments company PayPal Holdings Inc, now leads some of the most futuristic companies in the world. Besides Tesla, he heads rocket company SpaceX and Neuralink, a startup that is developing ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect the human brain to computers.

He set up the Boring Company to make affordable tunnels below busy city streets for an all-electric public transportation system to avoid the nasty traffic jams in U.S. cities.