Ten days later, Elon Musk was announced as the fourth richest man in the world. Now, the CEO of Tesla has surpassed Mark Zuckerberg and became the third richest man on earth.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Musk is now worth a staggering $115.4 billion USD, roughly $5 billion USD over Zuckerberg’s $110.8 billion USD. Musk’s net worth increased by $87.8 billion USD just this year as Tesla’s stock price rocketed up by almost 500 percent. Apart from this, he also unlocked three of the 12 tranches of stock options the electric car maker granted him when he signed on as CEO, which could amount to a total payout of $50 billion USD, the largest payday for any American CEO ever.

The world’s top five billionaires are as follows: Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Bernard Arnault, the CEO of LVMH in France.

Musk is also the founder of several other companies including SpaceX, The Boring Company, Hyperloop and OpenAI.

The wealth gains of billionaires during the pandemic has been criticised by human rights organisations and politicians. US Senator Bernie Sanders said, “At a time of enormous economic pain and suffering, we have a fundamental choice to make. We can continue to allow the very rich to get much richer while everyone else gets poorer and poorer. Or we can tax the winnings a handful of billionaires made during the pandemic to improve the health and well-being of tens of millions of Americans.”