Elon Musk has regained his spot as the world’s richest person, after briefly losing the title to France’s Bernard Arnault.
Musk’s wealth has been buoyed by a nearly 70 per cent surge in Tesla’s stock price this year. It’s up about 100 per cent from its intraday low on January 6 as investors pile back into bets on riskier growth stocks amid signs of economic strength and a slower pace of Federal Reserve interest-rate increases.
The company has also benefited from more demand for its electric vehicles after cutting prices on models.
Tesla shares rose 5.5 per cent to $207.63, boosting Musk’s net worth to $187.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That exceeds the $185.3 billion personal fortune of Arnault, the 73-year-old French tycoon behind luxury-goods powerhouse LVMH.
Musk, 51, entered 2023 with a net worth of $137 billion, becoming the first person ever to lose $200 billion from their fortune and raising the prospect that he might struggle to reclaim his title as the world’s richest individual.
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He was displaced atop Bloomberg’s wealth index for over two months after a steep slide in Tesla. Tesla’s gains have far outpaced the rally in the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 Index, which is up about 10 per cent in 2023.
Elon Musk has approached AI researchers in recent weeks about forming a new research lab to develop an alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, The Information reported on Monday, citing sources.
Tesla and Twitter chief Musk has been recruiting Igor Babuschkin, a researcher who recently left Alphabet’s DeepMind AI unit.
The report comes after ChatGPT, a chatbot developed by OpenAI gained widespread attention.
Musk, who had co-founded OpenAI along with Silicon Valley investor Sam Altman in 2015 as a nonprofit startup, had left its board in 2018.
Musk and Babuschkin have discussed assembling a team to pursue AI research but the project is still in the early stages, with no concrete plan to develop specific products, the report said. Babuschkin added that he has not officially signed onto the Musk initiative.
- Reuters
