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Elon Musk becomes the world’s richest man Passes Jeff Bezos with a net worth of more than £136bn

Elon Musk speaks during an unveiling event for the Boring Company Hawthorne test tunnel in Hawthorne, south Los Angeles, CA on December 18, 2008. Image: Getty images

Elon Musk the maverick boss of Tesla, has overtaken Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to become the world’s richest person, after shares in the electric car company he co-founded soared on hopes that a Democrat-controlled US Senate would usher in a new green agenda. 

The billionaire business magnate, Tesla, and SpaceX boss Musk have a net worth of more than $188.5 billion (£136bn) – $1.5 billion more than Bezos, Bloomberg reported.

Musk’s wealth has been boosted by last year’s more than eight-fold surge in the shares of Tesla, which became the world’s most valuable carmaker.

He has a 20 percent stake in the carmaker and about $42 billion of gains on vested stock options, according to the Bloomberg report.

Tesla shares were up as much as 7.4 percent on Thursday at a record high of $811.61.

Shares in the electric car company soared on hopes that a Democrat-controlled US Senate would usher in a new green agenda.

Elon Musk arrives at Tesla World wide Debut of Model X on February 9, 2012- Getty images

To take that into account, it applies a 25 percent discount to its shareholding, according to its report in November.

Musk, who co-founded and sold Internet payments company PayPal, now leads some of the most futuristic companies in the world.

Besides Tesla, he heads rocket firm SpaceX and Neuralink, a startup that is developing ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect our brains to computers.

Musk responded to the news of his status as the world’s richest person with tweets stating “how strange” and “well, back to work …”

Musk said he intended to use half of his fortune to “help problems on Earth” and “half to help establish a self-sustaining city on Mars to ensure continuation of life (of all species) in case Earth gets hit by a meteor like the dinosaurs or WW3 happens & we destroy ourselves”.

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