Elon Musk was unseated from the world’s richest person position on Monday. The Tesla Inc chief executive and billionaire’s top spot was taken by Chairman and CEO of LVMH Moët Hennessy – Louis Vuitton, Bernard Arnault. Musk lost his position after Tesla shares fell by 2.2 percent on May 17.
Musk’s fortune has dropped about $9.1 billion this year, according to Bloomberg’s wealth index. Meanwhile, Arnault’s net worth climbed $47 billion to $161.2 billion as sales of his firm’s luxury goods surge in China and other parts of Asia.
Musk, who held the top spot in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index as recently as March, now has a fortune of $160.6 billion, down 24 percent from its January high, according to Bloomberg,
In March, Elon Musk's net worth was pegged at $182 billion, narrowly ahead of Jeff Bezos of Amazon, whose wealth was pegged at $181 billion, according to to Bloomberg Billionaires Index,.
In January, Musk surpassed Amazon.com Inc’s Jeff Bezos to become the world’s richest man. He had a net worth of more than $188.5 billion, $1.5 billion more than Bezos, the report said.
According to the report, Musk’s personal wealth has received a fresh boost by the previous year’s more than eight-fold surge in the shares of Tesla, which became the world’s most valuable carmaker.
He has a 20 percent stake in the carmaker and about $42 billion of unrealized paper gains on vested stock options, according to the Bloomberg report.
Musk, who co-founded and sold Internet payments company PayPal Holdings Inc, now leads some of the most futuristic companies in the world such as rocket company SpaceX and Neuralink-a startup 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 US cities.