Being a CEO sucks. What that means, being the CEO, or the leader of many companies, should suck ever more.
Elon Musk is billionaire, a serial entrepreneur. Back in 2022 in a Lex Fridman podcast, Musk said that he had a friend who said "starting a company is like staring into the abyss and eating glass. There was some truth to that."
Musk also mentioned how he tend to avoid being handed the CEO title, with him in at least one occasion saying that he "never wanted to be CEO" of Tesla, and that he preferred to just work on developing product and advancing the technology.
"Running companies hurts my heart, but I don't see any other way to bring technology and design to fruition," he said.
The thing is, Musk is a man who is known for being proud of himself, and with that and among other reasons, the billionaire has reached yet another milestone in wealth.
This time, Musk is the first man in the modern history to have ever reached a net worth of $400 billion.
Born in South Africa, Elon Musk's business ventures can be traced back, all the way during the time he co-founded and sold Zip2 for over $300 million and created X.com, which evolved into PayPal and was sold for $1.5 billion.
He founded SpaceX in 2002 and co-founded Tesla in 2003, making electric vehicles mainstream. SolarCity, another of his ventures, was acquired by Tesla in 2016.
It was only in January 7, 2021, that he became the world’s richest person.
That was the time his net worth surged and surpassed $185 billion, overtaking Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. This milestone was driven by a surge in Tesla's stock price.
Musk who is also the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and X Corp (formerly Twitter), also holds significant stakes in each.
With his ownership at Tesla and SpaceX alone, his stock is valued at nearly $350 billion. And thanks to his ownership of X Corp followed a $44 billion acquisition, though its value has since dropped by 72%, and his shares at Neuralink, xAI, and The Boring Company, Musk managed to gain more than $200 billion in just one year.
Musk is committed to space exploration, with a long-term vision of retiring on Mars, and is a member of Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge.
Musk’s one-day wealth jump of $62.8 billion is the largest on record, and helped propel the combined fortunes of the world’s richest 500 people above $10 trillion, also for the first time, according to Bloomberg, which maintains a list of an updated billionaire index on its website.
In fact, Musk's $400 billion is almost double that of the world’s second richest man, Jeff Bezos, whose wealth is estimated at $244 billion.
Not tp mention that earlier this month, the court refused to allow Tesla to award Musk a huge $56 billion pay deal, in what would be one of the biggest executive rewards in U.S. history.
At this time, Musk had been due to receive the billions under a compensation package agreed in 2018, with the settlement was challenged in court by a disgruntled shareholder but later ratified by many Tesla’s investors.
The judge ruled that the cash involved was "an unfathomable sum" that was unfair to shareholders.
Elon Musk's massive boost in wealth can be attributed to the sudden increase in Tesla stock price.
This happens after he successfully backs Donald Trump in November’s election, and helped him become the President-elect.
Shares in Tesla, in particular, have rallied more and more amid expectations that the President-elect will scrap regulations seen to be holding back Musk’s business interests.
Not to mention how the billionaire himself is also appointed to run the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, which is tasked with slashing spending and bureaucracy in government.
To put $400 billion to another perspective, that number equals to 400,000 million dollars, or 400 times the value of one billion dollars.
It's a sum so massive that it was previously only associated with the valuation of giant companies or the GDP of countries.
The total annual budget of NASA is around $25 billion, so $400 billion could fund NASA’s activities for 16 years.
The U.S. military budget in 2023 was about $850 billion, meaning $400 billion would cover nearly half of that budget.
And as an American citizen, Canadian, and also South African, if he is to give away his entire net worth equally to the entire citizens of those countries, each person in these three countries would receive about $1,000.