According to The Guardian, Tesla’s founding boss Elon Musk has surpassed Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos to become the world’s richest person, after the electric car company’s shares soared.

The 49-year-old businessman’s net worth hit $186 billion, making Elon Musk $1.5 billion richer than Jeff Bezos, who has held the top spot since October 2017.

Billionaire Elon Musk overtakes Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to become the richest person in the world.

The journey of South African schoolboy Elon Musk to become the richest man in the world is one of the more extraordinary stories in the modern business world.

Born in 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa, his parents divorced before he was 10 years old. His mother was a model, his father was an electrical engineer and a real estate developer . Elon Musk soon became interested in computers and taught himself computer programming. When he moved to the US, young Elon Musk saw this as the land of opportunity.

Elon Musk has studied from a range of universities, including the University of Pennsylvania, while holding internships in Silicon Valley. Eventually, he was accepted into the PhD program at California’s prestigious Stanford University. However, Mr. Elon Musk dropped out after 2 days because of the explosion of the internet startup world .

Elon Musk’s first business venture started in Palo Alto, California, which is famous for taking over tech companies like Apple. A software company called Zip2 was founded with his brother Kimbal as Elon Musk’s first business. They started the business in 1995, when Elon Musk had to sleep in his office because he couldn’t afford an apartment.

In 1999, Elon Musk received $22 million for his shares when the company was sold to computer company Compaq.

It was PayPal that really pushed Elon Musk’s career into the stratosphere. He founded a digital financial services business called X.com in 1999, merging with the company that owned the fledgling payment processing business.

Despite disagreements over its role and strategic vision, the company became a global leader, and eBay paid $1.5 billion in stock for it in 2002. It was a deal. worth $165 million for Elon Musk.

His passion for space has led Musk to invest about $100 million of his rapidly expanding fortune into space exploration. He founded SpaceX in 2002 with the ambition of building a colony on Mars within a few decades.

Meanwhile, he focused on developing cheap and reusable spacecraft, with considerable success. In 2020, SpaceX becomes the first private company to put a person into orbit.

The sure business success story of Elon Musk’s life is Tesla, not PayPal. When Tesla was founded in 2003, Mr. Elon Musk was not yet a member of the company. But his funding and strategic vision have catapulted Tesla from a niche expert in electric vehicles to a stock market giant valued at more than $600 billion.

Much of that growth is recent. It skyrocketed to its current valuation within months of becoming the world’s most valuable automaker at $205 billion.

Tesla shares continuously increased in price in 2020.

By contrast, modern auto pioneer Ford is worth just over $35 billion. Tesla only surpassed Ford in stock market value in 2017. However, Tesla has never been profitable for a full financial year.

Tesla made it onto the S&P 500 list late last year as one of Wall Street’s most valuable companies.

CEO Elon Musk’s stake in Tesla is about 20%. This is the factor that puts him at the top of the list of the richest people in the world.

The US electric vehicle tax credits will benefit Tesla, which continues to have solid traction in today’s market, said Daniel Ives, analyst at Wedbush Securities.

Tesla’s stock could hit $1,000 in a “bullish case” scenario, if the company can achieve 1 million electric vehicle deliveries by 2022.

Tesla hit its goal of half a million cars last year. The California-based manufacturer’s annual sales jumped 36% in the fourth quarter, beating analysts’ expectations despite the pandemic to deliver a total of 499,550 vehicles in 2020.

However, CEO Elon Musk has yet to achieve all of his goals to trigger a controversial incentive arrangement. That could bring him a “huge” bonus of about $ 55.8 billion.