Elon Musk is the richest man in the world!

• Financial

Elon Musk is once again the richest man in the world. The CEO of Twitter and Tesla surpassed Bernard Arnault and returned to the top of the world according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Shares of Tesla closed on Wall Street up 5.5% pushing Musk's wealth to $187.1 billion.

Arnault is instead worth 185.3 billion dollars. The past few months have been difficult for Musk and Tesla stock has taken a toll with shareholders reeling from the specter of another sale of shares in the electric car giant by Musk to defray the expenses and costs of the company's takeover.

Despite fears, Tesla closed the fourth quarter with a profit jump of 59% to 3.7 billion dollars and revenues up 37% to 24.3 billion. Musk has subjected Twitter to a drastic slimming cure, more than halving its staff and exploring alternative avenues to increase revenues.

Elon Musk is the richest man in the world!

The billionaire recently admitted that he will probably need more time to stabilize the social network, perhaps until the end of the year. Only then will he pass the baton to a new CEO.

Elon had entered 2023 with 137 billion after losing 200 billion in 2022 with the acquisition of Twitter and investor fears about the Tesla holding with Musk distracted by the company chirping and growing competition. According to the Financial Times, Elon Musk is interested in turning Twitter into a payment platform that can compete with Apple Pay and PayPal.

Musk is also working on the infrastructure of the new service and it seems that he wants to go one step further, transforming Twitter into an all-in-one platform, capable of offering many more services than the current ones.

Back in November last year, Musk partially detailed his plans to enter the payments market during a meeting with advertisers, anticipating plans to allow Twitter accounts to transfer money to others within the social network.

Musk also sold at least $22 billion worth of stock in 2022, and his donation of Tesla stock to charity will help reduce the taxes he owes on profits from selling those shares. Musk sold 7.9 million Tesla shares worth $6.9 billion in August, 19.5 million shares worth $3.9 billion in November 2022, and another 22 million shares worth worth $3.6 billion in December.