: SpaceX CEO Elon Musk unveils the company’s new manned spacecraft, The Dragon V2, designed to carry astronauts into space during a news conference on May 29, 2014, in Hawthorne, California. The private spaceflight company has been flying unmanned capsules to the Space Station delivering cargo for the past two years. The Dragon V2 manned spacecraft will ferry up to seven astronauts to low-Earth orbit.
Elon Musk is the world’s richest billionaire and heads the world’s most valuable automobile maker.
With year-end gains of $52.4 billion, he remains the only billionaire with a wealth valuation of over $200 billion.
Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index shows that his net worth surged to $222 billion following an agreement with investors appraising his SpaceX at more than $100 billion.
The agreement gives Musk a further $10.6 billion due to his ownership of his rocket company, which was founded in 2002 to colonize Mars. With $191.6 billion, Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com Inc. ranks second globally.
Tesla Inc., which Musk co-founded in 2003 after making a fortune from the $1.56 billion sale of eBay’s e-commerce platform PayPal, is a major source of Musk’s wealth.
SpaceX’s new valuation comes less than a year after it successfully flew astronauts to the International Space Station for NASA. This company is now worth more than Lockheed Martin Corporation, the biggest defence contractor globally.
In spite of a fragile economic recovery, Musk’s wealth is accumulating rapidly as central banks inject liquidity into the global economy.
At a Tesla Gigafactory open house this weekend, the billionaire father of six disclosed that the company will start producing its Model Y vehicles there by the holiday season.
By the end of 2021, the CEO hoped to have up to 10,000 vehicles produced at the plant. While local authorities evaluate the plant’s environmental impact on the area, Tesla is still awaiting final approval for its construction.
As an electric vehicle manufacturer and online retailer, Tesla, Inc. designs, develops, manufactures, leases, and sells electric vehicles across the United States, China, and around the world.
Recall, some days ago, Tesla had earlier moved its headquarters from California, which is home to relatively high taxes and living costs, to Texas, joining the likes of Oracle, HP, and Toyota Motor.
Silicon Valley is known for new ideas and businesses, but Texas is often attributed with cheaper labour and fewer restrictions.
