Elon Musk is no longer the richest billionaire on the planet after Tesla’s share price has depreciated by nearly 25% this year, the South African billionaire has now been overtaken by his big rival, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Business Insider reports.

Bloomberg now estimates Musk’s net worth at $198 billion, while Bezos’ fortune has risen to $200 billion thanks to Amazon’s share price rally earlier this year. On January 2, when the first trading session of the New York Stock Exchange opened, the price of one Amazon share was $149.93, and now it has risen to $177.58.

During the same time period, Tesla’s stock price fell 24% to $188.14.

Since the fortunes of both men, like all the great billionaires on the planet, are closely related to the share price of the companies in which they own the largest stake, Bezos is now the richest person in the world for the first time since 2021. , when Amazon enjoyed impressive growth amid a surge in e-commerce during the pandemic.

But unlike Tesla, which Elon Musk has spent years trying to portray as a technology company rather than a traditional carmaker, Amazon continues to benefit from huge investor enthusiasm for AI technology, with its share price up nearly 90% year-over-year and after 2022, when the share prices of technology companies have undergone a major correction.

By comparison, Tesla’s stock price is down 3% over the same period in 2023.

Although Musk was temporarily dethroned as the world’s richest man last year and in 2022 by Bernard Arnault, the founder and CEO of luxury goods group LVMH, he is now losing the title to Bezos for the first time since September 2021.

Musk said he would give Bezos a silver medal when he last met him on the world’s billionaires list

The rivalry between the two, fueled largely by Musk’s comments, is notorious as the two billionaires vie for private-sector dominance in space through their aerospace companies SpaceX and Blue Origin.

One of the arguments between the two involved the Artemis mission, with which NASA wants to return a human crew to the moon. The US government’s aerospace company is awarding a huge contract to SpaceX to develop the Starship rocket it plans to use for the mission. .

Blue Origin tried to challenge NASA’s decision in court, where it ultimately lost, but not before unleashing a series of sometimes borderline decency attacks from Musk.

In September 2021, with Musk overtaking Bezos in net worth and amid controversy over NASA’s Artemis mission contract, the South African billionaire said he would send the Amazon founder a silver medal to mark the fact that he had once again dropped to second place. ranking of the richest people in the world.

Currently, they are followed in the ranking of the richest people on the planet by Berno Arnaud (with a fortune of 197 billion dollars), Mark Zuckerberg (179 billion) and Bill Gates (150 billion).