After playing a game of leap frog with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier this month, Elon Musk’s net worth has surpassed Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s own immense wealth.
The Tesla CEO won a $10 billion boost to his wealth on Monday, bringing his total net worth to $202 billion, according to Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires List. After gaining $1.3 billion since Friday, Bezos is worth an equally mind-boggling — although smaller — $198.9 billion.
In March, after selling 50 million Amazon shares worth about $8.4 billion, Bezos overtook Musk. Those sales were the first time Bezos sold Amazon stock since 2021.
Both men are still behind Bernard Arnault, chairman of the luxury conglomerate LVMH, and his family. According to Forbes, the Arnaults are worth $209.6 billion after taking a nearly $4 billion hit.
Musk’s surging wealth stems from his investment in Tesla, which he has led as chief executive since 2008. He owns about 20.5% of Tesla shares, for now, and leads six other companies.
Tesla stock climbed more than 12% in trading Monday after Musk made an unannounced visit to China to meet with Premier Li Qiang. The boom reversed nearly two months of losses driven by poor sales, mass layoffs, executive resignations, and missed earnings.
Chinese authorities on Sunday tentatively approved the Austin, Texas-based company’s plans to fully launch its Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology in the country. Tesla will deploy FSD using Baidu’s navigation and mapping services, building on an existing partnership that’s been on the books since 2020. The government-backed China Association of Automobile Manufacturers said Sunday that Tesla’s Model 3 and Model Y were compliant with China’s data-security requirements.
Musk is also looking to obtain approval to transfer data collected in China abroad to train its algorithms for self-driving vehicles. Since 2021, Tesla has stored all data collected by its Chinese fleet of electric vehicles in the country, as required by local regulators.
“If Musk is able to obtain approval from Beijing to transfer data collected in China abroad this would be a ‘game changer’ around the acceleration of training its algorithms for its autonomous technology globally,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives wrote in a note to investors, calling the meeting a “watershed” moment for Musk.