Elon Musk, owner of Tesla Inc. and SpaceX, has passed Microsoft founder Bill Gates to officially become the second richest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Musk’s net worth was listed at $127.9 billion, ahead of Gates’ $127.7 billion, in the latest list published Monday. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is first on the list at $182 billion.
The 49-year-old Musk co-founded Tesla, an electric vehicle and clean energy company based in Palo Alto, in 2003.
He founded his Hawthorne-based aerospace company SpaceX in 2002. The company revolutionized the spaceflight industry through its system of recovering the first-stage boosters of its signature Falcon 9 rockets for reuse, slashing the costs of future missions.
Musk owns two homes in Bel Air.
The list can be found at www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/.