Technology billionaire Elon Musk has once again surpassed luxury goods tycoon Bernard Arnault to become the richest person in the world.
One of the reasons for this comeback is that Elon Musk’s new artificial intelligence startup xAI has raised an additional $6 billion, with an initial valuation of $18 billion.
Forbes estimates that Elon Musk’s net worth is $209.5 billion as of Tuesday, May 28 (US time), $5.2 billion more than Bernard Arnault. The French luxury goods tycoon has an estimated fortune of about 204.3 billion USD.
Amazon boss Jeff Bezos dropped to third place, with an estimated fortune of about $200 billion. Bezos has frequently taken the number two spot with Musk in recent months.
The startup xAI was founded by Musk last July to compete with OpenAI, the company behind the artificial intelligence tool that took the world by storm, ChatGPT.
Musk is actually also the co-founder of Open AI, but the billionaire 𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐧 in 1971 decided to leave the company after 3 years of joining. The reason Musk gave was that Open AI was too “pursuing profit”, thereby weakening its original mission of developing artificial intelligence “to benefit humanity”.
During a presentation to investors, xAI introduced an open source version of the Grok chatbot. This is considered xAI’s biggest achievement to date.
According to experts, Musk is one of the few investors in the world with abundant capital to compete with OpenAI, Google or Meta in AI.
“Join xAI if you believe in our mission to understand the universe. This is something that requires the pursuit of truth at the maximum rigor,” Elon Musk wrote on his personal page later.
Forbes estimates that Musk owns 60% of xAI’s shares, worth $14.4 billion after the recent deal. Previously, he led a group of investors to acquire the social network Twitter (later renamed X) for $44 billion. Forbes believes that the value of Musk’s 74% stake in X is currently worth about 7 billion USD.
The rest of Musk’s assets are largely tied to nearly 12% of Tesla shares and an estimated 42% of SpaceX shares.
Tesla’s precarious stock has caused Musk to frequently lose the No. 1 spot on the list of the richest people on the planet recently. Luxury goods tycoon Bernard Arnault most recently surpassed Musk at the end of January this year.
