Elon Musk Close To Surpassing Jeff Bezos as World's Richest Person

Elon Musk, the outspoken entrepreneur behind Tesla and SpaceX, kicked off the new year by homing in on a characteristically audacious title: the richest person on the planet. From a report: A 4.9% rally in the electric carmaker's share price Wednesday boosted Musk to within $3 billion of Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, who currently occupies the top spot on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a ranking of the world's 500 wealthiest people. The South Africa-born engineer's net worth was $184.5 billion at 11:40 a.m. in New York, just shy of Bezos, who has held the top spot since October 2017. As chief executive officer of Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, Musk is also a rival to Bezos, owner of Blue Origin, in the private space race. The milestone caps an extraordinary 12 months for Musk. Over the past year his net worth soared by more than $146 billion in possibly the fastest bout of wealth creation in history.

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