If all goes according to plan, SpaceX founder and Tesla CEO Elon Musk could be well on his way to becoming the world’s first trillionaire by 2024.
Musk is currently the world’s richest person and has been in the news for the last few months over his USD 44 billion deal to buy Twitter, the social media platform where he is known to be very active.
As on 14 June, Forbes estimates the maverick business tycoon’s real-time net worth at USD 203.3 billion. Yet he is far ahead of the second-placed Bernard Arnault & family, whose net-worth as on the date stands at USD 140.2 billion.
More about ‘The Trillion Dollar Club’ report
A report, titled ‘The Trillion Dollar Club’, speculates that Musk will become a trillionaire in the next two years.
The report was published by Tripalti Approve, a firm that “enables finance and procurement teams to gain visibility and control over spending.” It includes 21 names who, according to the firm, have a realistic chance of becoming a trillionaire during their lifetimes.
Tripalti Approve made its predictions by comparing the annual net worths of the world’s 30 richest people from 2017 to 2022 to calculate the year on year annual growth rate for each of them.
For calculation’s sake, Tripalti Approve predicted the future net worth of each of the 21 billionaires by keeping the January 2022 net worth as the base.
What will possibly make Elon Musk a trillionaire
“Since 2017, Musk’s fortune has shown an annual average increase of 129 percent, which could potentially see him enter the trillion-dollar club in just two short years, achieving a net worth of USD 1.38 trillion by 2024 at age 52,” the report says.
The report notes that a majority of Musk’s wealth has come from Tesla and SpaceX.
“These two companies combined saw Musk’s fortune soar from USD 25 billion in 2020 to USD 263 billion in 2022,” the report says.
Other trillionaires as per the report
As per the study, the first person after Musk to become a trillionaire will be India’s Gautam Adani. The billionaire founder of Adani Group is India’s richest man and the sixth richest in the world with a real-time net worth of USD 98.8 billion, as per Forbes. Tripalti Approve predicts that he will become a trillionaire by 2025.
Zhang Yiming, the founder-CEO of Chinese company ByteDance, is predicted to be the third person to reach the trillion-dollar mark, which he might achieve in 2026.
According to Tripalti Approve, Jeff Bezos, until recently the world’s richest man, will become a trillionaire only in 2030.
Other notable names who might become trillionaires include Reliance Industries Ltd. chairman Mukesh Ambani (2029), Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page (2032), Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (2034), Kering founder François Pinault (2034), and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates (2044).
The report cautions that the “standings can change very quickly” and cites the example of Zhong Shanshan. After two of his companies went public in Hong Kong in 2020, the net worth of the Nongfu Spring chairman jumped hundreds of percentages from a mere USD 2 billion in 2020 to USD 71 billion in 2022.
(Main and Featured images: Patrick Pleul/POOL/AFP)
