Elon Musk, who completed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter on Thursday, is the world’s richest person, with a current net worth of $204bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
However, his net worth has dropped by about $66.4bn since the start of the year, the index showed.
How much is Elon Musk worth now?
Mr Musk’s enormous fortune exceeds that of Bernard Arnault, chairman of French luxury group LVMH and the world’s second-wealthiest person with a net worth of $140bn — by $64bn.
The 50-year-old founder and chief executive of electric vehicle maker Tesla and rocket company SpaceX was crowned the world’s richest person in January this year, when his net worth was valued at $273.5bn by Bloomberg, which compared his wealth with John D Rockefeller.
“Mr Musk reached the level of riches, inflation-adjusted, achieved by modern history’s wealthiest person,” Bloomberg said at the time.
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Watch: Elon Musk enters Twitters HQ as he prepares to buy company
On April 14, Mr Musk launched his surprise bid for Twitter after becoming the microblogging platform's largest single shareholder with a stake of 9.2 per cent, or 73.5 million shares valued at about $3bn.
His offer price of $54.20 per share represented a 38 per cent premium on the closing price of Twitter's stock on April 1, the last trading day before his investment in the company was publicly announced.
Despite raising $46.5bn to finance his bid to buy Twitter, a combination of volatile stock markets, the Russia-Ukraine crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic has taken a toll on Mr Musk’s net worth, Bloomberg said.
Richest person in the world
Mr Musk was also declared the richest person in the world in April by Forbes magazine in its annual 2022 World Billionaires List with a personal fortune of $219bn.
The Forbes annual list used stock prices and exchange rates from March 11 to calculate Mr Musk’s net worth, whereas the Bloomberg Billionaires Index is updated daily.
However, the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires list, which is updated daily, puts Mr Musk's current net worth at $223.8bn.
“Even after selling billions of dollars of Tesla stock late last year, and owing taxes on gains from those sales, Musk is an estimated $68bn richer than a year ago,” Forbes said in its annual report.
What is Mr Musk's background?
The Canadian-American businessman was born in South Africa and has seven children.
His stake in privately held SpaceX is valued at about $40.3bn, figures compiled by Bloomberg show.
Mr Musk has a history of posting market-moving tweets to stoke interest in his ventures, which has drawn the ire of the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
In March, Bitcoin, Ether and Dogecoin were given a quick boost after he tweeted that he owns the digital tokens and isn’t planning to sell.
In response, Bitcoin, which had fallen as much as 2.9 per cent before Mr Musk’s tweet, wiped out its losses then retreated again. Ether was also up as much as 2.3 per cent before giving up some gains, while Dogecoin rose 3.8 per cent.
In November, Tesla's shares fell as much as 4.5 per cent at the start of trading in New York, having dropped nearly 7 per cent in premarket trading after Mr Musk asked his more than 80 million followers on Twitter whether he should sell 10 per cent of his holdings in the electric vehicle maker. A clear majority (58 per cent) of the 3.5 million Twitter users who voted said yes.
Mr Musk made his first millions in the 1990s, when he sold his first company, Zip2, for more than $300m. He then launched X.com, an online payment system that eventually became PayPal, which he sold to eBay for $1.5bn in 2002.
