NUMBER OF THE DAY
Elon Musk’s Surging Net Worth, by the Numbers
A $13 billion jump in the stock market made the Tesla CEO the third-richest person on the planet
$123 billion: That was Elon Musk’s net worth by the end of stock trading Thursday — a $13 billion jump from Monday — making him the world’s third-richest person.
After a dozen years of the brow-furrowed tut-tuts of naysayers galore, Tesla on Monday was approved for entry to the halls of the establishment: the S&P 500 Index. As a result, index-tracking institutional investors that had thumbed their nose for years were forced to snap up its shares. That pushed up the company’s stock price — and Musk’s net worth.
The vindication of the bad boy of the auto industry was justified. It’s hard to think of another entrepreneur in memory who has so overturned a legacy industry by joining it. Not Jeff Bezos, who created his own industry — the e-book and later e-commerce store. Nor even Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, similarly at the front-end of burgeoning sectors. Instead, the annals of brash business are filled with the detritus of Icaruses that broke into existing industries and reached great heights only to tumble to the ground — DeLorean, People Express, and Quibi, to name a few.
