Elon Musk Updated Net Worth To Celebrate His 50th Birthday

Elon Musk, Tesla CEO, SpaceX founder and the world’s third richest person, celebrated his 50th birthday this year with a massive jump in his fortune.

Musk’s net worth soared by $9.9 billion last week after the White House reached a deal with a bipartisan group of senators on an infrastructure bill, putting his fortune at $165.9 billion, Forbes reported. According to a White House fact sheet, the bill includes $15 billion for building a national network of 500,000 electric vehicle chargers and electrifying school buses and transit buses.

As of Tuesday, the fortune of the tech mogul, who has been aiming to bring people to Mars, grew once more as it is currently at $169.3 billion, according to the outlet.

The bulk of Musk’s net worth comes from his shares in Tesla and SpaceX, which total 20% and 48%, respectively. He also holds about $50 billion worth of unrealized gains on vested options from a pay package he negotiated in 2018, according to Celebrity Net Worth.

Musk first made his fortune in 1999 when he sold his first company, Zip2, to Compaq for a reported $307 million in cash and $34 million in stock options. In the same year, he co-founded online financial services/payments company X.com, whose acquisition led to the creation of PayPal the next year. Paypal was sold in 2002 for $1.5 billion in stock by eBay, according to Celebrity Net Worth.

The third company Musk founded was Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, in 2002. NASA recognized the company’s capabilities and potential in 2008, partnering with Musk for cargo transport to the International Space Station (ISS).

Musk then joined Tesla Motors when it was founded in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning and was retroactively named co-founder.

In August 2020, Musk's net worth topped $100 billion for the first time, resulting in him breaching the list of the top five richest people in the world, Forbes reported. In January, he surpassed Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to become the world's richest person due to a surge in Tesla's share price, but the latter reclaimed his title a month later.

Despite being a billionaire, Musk doesn’t go over the top with vacations, with the SpaceX founder using the majority of his time working and expanding his companies. But he does spend a lot of money on real estate.

He purchased a bachelor pad that sat on a 1.67-acre lot in the Bel-Air neighborhood of Los Angeles in 2012 for $17 million, Yahoo Finance reported. He is estimated to own $70 million worth of residential property in the neighborhood.