Elon Musk is Again Close to Becoming the World's Wealthiest Person

Thanks to Tesla Inc.'s 70% rise in valuation this year, Elon Musk may soon be able to regain his title as the world's richest person, a title he lost in December when he fell below Bernard Arnault.

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Despite Musk's promising performance, however, it may take him some time before he overtakes the French luxury goods, titan because he disclosed this week that he gave 11.6 million Tesla shares to unnamed charities between August and December. Based on the closing prices of the stock on the day Musk donated the securities, the stock was worth about $1.9 billion.

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There is evidence that the demand for Tesla's electric vehicles has been growing over the past year, resulting in Musk narrowing the gap to Arnault to under $10 billion.

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After his latest donation, he now has a fortune worth about $184 billion after making his latest donation. There was a high of over $300 billion in late 2021 before he decided to buy Twitter in a leveraged buyout near the peak of the tech market, but it has increased more than almost $50 billion this year, down from a high of more than $300 billion in late 2021.

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Musk, Tesla's CEO and the company's biggest shareholder has previously made a generous donation of shares of the company, estimated to be worth about $5.7 billion, a donation that was at the time one of the largest in history from an individual.

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Upon closer inspection, it was revealed that the donation had gone to the Musk Foundation, which has recently supplied funds to education projects, carbon-removal projects, as well as nonprofit organizations in the area around Brownsville, Texas, near where Musk's SpaceX spaceport is located.

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In the wake of the pandemic, the foundation relocated from California to Texas, and the 2021 gift dramatically increased the size of the organization.

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Pandemic Move

Musk will have to become more active philanthropically as a result of the increase in the assets of the organization. The US government requires private foundations to devote at least 5% of their assets to charitable purposes each year. Musk sent out a total of $160 million from his organization in 2021 to nonprofits, by far the most he had donated from the organization in a calendar year.

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Even though Musk is one of the biggest foundations in the country, the charitable arm of Musk remains small in terms of the number of employees it has. According to its most recent tax forms, Musk, Jared Birchall, who is Musk's right-hand man, and Matilda Simon are the company's directors. Currently, there is no information about any other employees in the company.

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A request for comment sent to Birchall on Wednesday did not get a response.

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One of the largest foundations in the US is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. As of the end of 2021, the foundation had a net worth of about $55 billion, gave out $6.2 billion in grants, and employed over 1,700 people.

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Despite the fact that SpaceX has made up a larger share of Musk's wealth in the past few years, a significant portion of Musk's wealth still sits in Tesla stock. During the past year, Musk sold more than $20 billion of Tesla stock to shore up the buyout of Twitter, which he was attempting to complete.