To the surprise of absolutely no one, online
retail giant Amazon has positively thrived during the recent pandemic, making its owner,
multi-billionaire Jeff Bezos, even more wealthy than ever before - and he was plenty rich
before the pandemic hit. And yet, despite recording-breaking success
for Amazon in 2020, by early January 2021 Bezos had been shockingly ousted from the
top spot on the Forbes List of the world’s richest people, and the financial world was
shocked by how Elon Musk became the richest person in the world. Elon Musk’s climb to the top is a fascinating
story because it might just be the fastest rise in wealth creation in all of history. In March 2020, less than 1 year before he
was crowned The World’s Richest, Musk had a net worth of only $27 billion dollars, and
had just barely cracked Bloomberg’s list of the world’s 50 richest people. In just 9 short months, Musk added more than
$165 billion dollars to his net worth to claim the top spot among the world’s richest billionaires. By November 2020, Musk had climbed his way
into the top 5 richest people in the world, and that’s when his rise to the top started
in earnest. Within a month, Musk overtook both Facebook
creator Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft’s Bill Gates to become the 3rd richest person
in the world. In December 2020, he passed French tycoon
Bernard Arnault to take the #2 spot. That left Musk behind only Jeff Bezos and
Amazon, who were seemingly untouchable coming off of a record year in 2020 thanks to a surge
in business generated by the pandemic. But, to the shock of the financial world,
Musk did the impossible - in early January 2021, Musk’s net worth surged to $190 billion
dollars, nearly $5 billion ahead of Bezos. How did he do it? How did Elon Musk rise through the ranks of
the world’s billionaires and tycoons to become the world’s richest person in less
than a year? Well, that might be best illustrated by his
own response to the news that he had hit #1. Musk replied to a Tweet that announced his
ascension to the #1 spot, saying simply, “How strange. Well, back to work.” Indeed, hard work has been the key to Musk’s
impressive success. While his rise to the top may have seemed
to happen overnight, the truth is that Musk has been working towards this moment his entire
life, putting his heart and soul into every project he undertakes. Musk’s electric car company, Tesla, was
launched in 2003, but only turned its first profit in 2020. In 2018, when Tesla was plagued by production
delays, Musk told reporters that he was “back to sleeping at the factory”, dedicating
his every waking hour to getting things back on track. Without that kind of intense focus and work
ethic, Musk would never have been able to rise through the ranks of the world’s wealthiest. Of course, such an incredible and rapid rise
to the top of the world’s wealthiest people doesn’t come without controversy. Musk has been accused of being complicit in
the deaths of child laborers in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where children are forced
to work in brutal conditions to mine cobalt, a valuable and essential material required
for manufacturing computers. Tesla workers have also spoken out against
Musk’s hardline stance against unions, claiming that any pro-union activities within his factories
are swiftly shut down. Hard work may be Musk’s secret to success,
but that success hasn’t come without a healthy dose of ruthlessness and controversy, too. It’s an inescapable economic truth that
you’ll never truly get wealthy by working for someone else. Entrepreneurship is the only path to becoming
one of the world’s richest people. Every billionaire that Musk passed on his
way to the top - from Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett to even Jeff Bezos - every
one of them got where they are by building extremely profitable and scalable businesses,
and Elon Musk is no exception. Innovation and entrepreneurship seem to be
in Elon Musk’s DNA - though being born into a wealthy South African family certainly didn’t
hurt. He first discovered his love of computers
and technology at the age of 10, and, after teaching himself to code, launched his business
career at age 12 when he sold his first software, a computer game called Blastar. At 17 he moved to Canada to attend Queens
University - and to avoid the mandatory military service in his home country of South Africa. As his mother was Canadian, Musk obtained
his Canadian citizenship that same year, but he already had his sights on the future - he
figured Canadian citizenship would be a stepping stone to his ultimate goal - U.S. citizenship. 3 years later, Musk fulfilled his dream and
moved to the U.S. to attend the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned 2 bachelor’s
degrees in economics and physics. His next stop was the prestigious Stanford
University, where he enrolled in the PhD program in energy physics, but the boy genius would
last just 2 days at Stanford before dropping out. His arrival in California had coincided with
the internet boom, and Musk and his brother Kimbal took a huge gamble, leaving behind
the world of higher education and launching their first start-up company, online city
directory Zip2. Musk’s gamble paid off - big time. Through hard work and tireless effort, Musk
had built a hugely popular and profitable business, and in 1999, Musk sold Zip2 to Compaq
for the astonishing price of $307 million dollars, plus more than $30 million in stock
options. But rather than sit back and enjoy his success,
Musk showed the first glimpses of the uncanny business acumen that would later help him
climb the list of the world’s wealthiest people. He immediately turned around and invested
the proceeds from the sale of his first company to fund his next venture, X.com - an online
payment platform that would later become PayPal. 2002 was a banner year for Musk - he fulfilled
one of his life’s goals when he became a U.S. citizen, and he also earned his first
billion at age 30 when he sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion dollars. But Musk was not done - far from it. Finally, he had the money to go after his
true, lifelong dream. As Musk explains in a tweet pinned to the
top of his Twitter profile: “About half my money is intended 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
and we destroy ourselves.” The sincerity of Musk’s desire to solve
the world’s problems may be dubious at best - the billionaire has been accused of hoarding
his wealth rather than using it to make a tangible difference in the world - but with
that ambitious goal in mind, and the proceeds of his latest sale in his pocket, Musk went
on to launch 2 companies that certainly changed the world as we know it, and would eventually
propel him to the top of the list of the world’s richest people. Musk created SpaceX in 2003 to build spacecraft
for commercial travel. It may have been a far-fetched dream at the
time, but by 2008, he had successfully secured contracts with NASA to supply cargo to the
International Space Station. In 2012, he made history when SpaceX launched
the first unmanned Falcon 9 rocket on a resupply mission to the ISS, marking the first time
that a private company had sent a spacecraft to the space station. Musk eventually plans to use SpaceX to shuttle
astronauts to the ISS, as NASA moves away from using its own craft, but his focus is
always on the ultimate long-term goal of colonizing Mars. Space X may be a revolutionary success story,
but the real secret to Musk’s success, at least as far as his position of richest person
in the world is concerned, is Tesla. Musk also launched Tesla in 2003 using funds
from the PayPal sale, and at the time, his ambitions for the electric car company seemed
as outrageous as his plans to colonize Mars. Musk wanted to take on the giants of the auto
industry with affordable, mass-market electric cars, an idea that seemed ludacris in the
early 2000s. Against all odds, Musk’s hard work once
again paid off, and Tesla’s surprising success paved the way for Musk to enter the exclusive
realm of the world’s richest and wealthiest people. By 2017, Tesla had overtaken General Motors
to become the most valuable car maker in the U.S., and Tesla’s all-electric sports car,
the Roadster, is set to be one of the fastest production cars ever made. But things really kicked up a notch in 2020,
pushing Musk over the edge to become the world’s wealthiest person. Tesla’s share price skyrocketed in 2020,
increasing by a staggering 720% in that year alone. In the first weeks of 2021, the stock climbed
another 20%, giving Musk the final push he needed to crack the top spot on the list of
the world’s richest. Tesla is now valued at more than $700 billion
dollars - more than Toyota, Volskwagen, Hyundai, General Motors and Ford combined. Musk’s unmatched work ethic and his forward
thinking - as well as his ruthlessness - have certainly played a key role in the rise of
Tesla stock, but Musk was helped along in his journey to becoming the richest person
in the world by some factors that were entirely outside of his control. For one thing, despite Musk’s surprising
ties to Trump early in his presidency, the recent U.S. election results may have prompted
renewed faith in the future of the electric car industry in general, as Democrats are
generally seen as more friendly to green agendas with things like tax credits for consumers
who buy electric vehicles. Surprisingly, the pandemic might also have
helped Tesla and Musk reach new heights. According to The Institute for Policy Studies,
the 500 richest people in the world increased their combined wealth by a stunning $1.8 trillion
dollars in 2020, and the U.S.’s 651 home-grown billionaires alone grew their wealth by more
than $1 trillion dollars over just 9 months. It’s clear that the pandemic provided a
hefty boost to all of the ultra-rich, but perhaps none so much as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Still, despite a record-shattering year for
Amazon in 2020, some key events in the life of CEO Jeff Bezos played a huge role in allowing
Elon Musk to bypass him to become the world’s richest person. Not only did Bezos lose some of his stake
in Amazon in his divorce settlement, handing over 4% of his shares to ex-wife MacKenzie
Scott, but he also donated shares worth more than $680 million dollars through his Bezos
Earth Fund in November of 2020. These losses added up to a big drop in Bezos’
net worth, and might have been as much to blame for Musk passing Bezos in the list of
the worlds’ richest people as anything Musk himself did. By the way, how does the richest person in
the world spend their money? Probably not the way we’d expect… When Musk first started his climb up the ladder
of the world’s richest people, he certainly went on a buying spree, snapping up over $100
million dollars worth of prime California real estate, including a $17 million dollar,
1.67 acre estate complete with a 2 story library, a private gym, a personal home theatre and
a 1,000-bottle wine cellar. However, in 2020 Musk started to sell off
his properties, telling reporters that he planned to eventually “own no home”. And it’s not just real estate that the billionaire
plans to get rid off - in 2012 Musk signed The Giving Pledge, vowing to give away and
donate the majority of his wealth during his lifetime, though he’s yet to live up to
this promise. As the head of one of the world’s most innovative
auto companies, perhaps it’s not surprising that Musk has an affinity for cars. He purchased the Lotus Esprit submarine car
from a James Bond movie at auction for $920,000 dollars, and he also owns a Ford Model T and
a Jaguar E-Type Series 1 Roadster - both gas-powered. But other than a taste for fine cars, Musk
insists that he is simply too busy to live a lavish lifestyle. He has told reporters that he frequently works
120 hour weeks, and that he’s only taken a total of 2 weeks off in the 12 years since
he founded Tesla. He even spent his 48th birthday in 2019 at
Tesla, working on “global logistics” for the company. Musk definitely doesn’t live like a typical
billionaire - he says he enjoys inexpensive hobbies like playing video games, listening
to music and reading, and spending time with his kids and his friends. “But,” he says, whenever he has any free
time “it’s usually ‘work more’.” Through hard work and laser-like focus - and
with a generous helping of luck - Elon Musk managed to do the impossible once again, surpassing
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to become the richest person in the world as of January 2021. In the cutthroat world of business, only time
will tell whether Musk will be able to hang on to the top spot. Musk was right on point when he tweeted “Back
to work” in response to the news that he was the world’s richest person. Tesla is still a relatively new company, and
it only turned its first profit in 2020. Musk’s recent ascension to the top of the
list of the world’s richest people has only put more pressure on the billionaire innovator
to prove that Tesla can live up to expectations and become more profitable than the entire
motor industry combined in order to justify its current valuation, which is the cornerstone
of Musk’s net worth. No matter how Elon Musk became the richest
person in the world, and regardless of whether he manages to stay at the top, we’re sure
to see some interesting things from Musk and Tesla in the future! If you thought this video was fascinating,
you’ll definitely want to be sure and check out our other videos, like this one called
“Elon Musk vs. the Average American - How Do They Compare?”, or, maybe you’ll like
this other video, instead.
