Tesla CEO Elon Musk has officially regained his previous spot as the world’s richest person after briefly losing the spot to French businessman Bernard Arnault.
Musk regained his position thanks to Tesla Inc.’s stock price surging to 70 percent this year due to investors piling on bets into riskier growth stocks. The new move from investors comes in the wake of a slowing in the pace of Federal Reserve interest-rate increases and signs of a strengthening economy.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Musk’s net worth was boosted to $187.1 billion after the Tesla share price rose 5.5 percent to $207.63. This surpassed Arnault’s personal reported net worth of $185.3 billion.
Bloomberg reported that Musk entered the new year off to a bad start with a net worth of $137 billion after becoming the first ever person to lose $200 billion.
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It is believed his loss of such a great fortune was due to a lack of investor faith in him as Tesla’s CEO after the highly publicized purchase of Twitter and his subsequent take over as CEO of the social media giant.
Musk stated his intention of resigning as Twitter CEO once he was able to successfully find someone “foolish” enough to take the job. He has previously stated that he might need to stay until the end of the year to better stabilize Twitter’s finances.
An analyst with RBC Capital Markets, Tom Narayan, wrote that Tesla is the “posterchild” for electric cars.
“We believe there is strong demand for Tesla product even in the face of more EV competition,” Narayan added.
