Elon Musk, the genius behind Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) , SpaceX, and other multi-million dollar companies, replaced Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as the richest person in the world.

According to the real-time Bloomberg Billionaire Index, Bezos is $3 billion richer than Musk, as of this writing. However, the tracker will update at the end of the trading day and will show that Musk already surpassed Bezos as the world's wealthiest man.

Musk's wealth rose after Tesla shares were trading higher on Thursday. TSLA shares closed $816.04 each, up by nearly 8%.

The increase added $10.6 billion to the Tesla CEO’s fortune. His net worth is now over $191 billion.

The stock price of Bezos’ Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) rose less than 1% to $3,162.16 per share. His net worth also rose by around $2 billion to $187 billion.

In 2020,  the value of Bezos' stockholdings in Amazon surged by $75 billion to $173.3 billion. The e-commerce giant and its CEO owes their success to the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced Americans to shop online.

On the other hand, Musk and Tesla has a great year in 2020. TSLA shares rose 743%. The company's value is now more than $773.3 billion. Since the beginning of 2021. the company's stock price already increased more than $100 per share, gifting Musk’s Tesla holdings and options a lift of about $21 billion lift.

Musk also overtook the United States' most valuable oil company ExxonMobil (XOM). That being said, He is currently worth more than America’s largest oil company, proving that electric cars will soon be the alternative vehicles. According to Tesla filings, Musk is set to qualify for options to buy 16.9 million shares of the company this year. The options stand at $12.3 billion based on the current value of TSLA shares,

Meanwhile, the world's third richest person is Bill Gates who is now worth $132, according to the index.

The world’s 500 richest people added a 35% increase in net worth, or a $1.8 trillion combined in net worth over the past 12 months.

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