Not sure we should be happy about it, but we have to get the information across: Elon Musk last night became the richest man of the industrial period. With a fortune estimated at $348 billion, Trump's new collaborator rises far ahead of the other “armored vehicles” of our time: Jeff Bezos ($219 billion), Larry Ellison ($206 billion), Mark Zuckerberg (198 billion dollars) and the French Bernard Arnault ($168 billion). are far, far behind. It should be noted that a large part of this fortune is stock market, and therefore virtually conditional on the sale of shares held by Musk. As long as the latter does not sell his shares, these hundreds of billions of dollars cannot be exploited as current currency, which is very different from the actual physical fortunes held by certain kings and emperors in history, or more recently the tycoons of the beginning of the industrial era, between the 19th and 20th centuries, whose fortune was well valued in hard dollars.
These 348 billion, Elon Musk reached them thanks to a spectacular surge in Tesla shares in recent days, a surge which itself follows Musk's promotion in the administration of Donald Trump. In a few hours, Elon Musk's stock market assets were enriched by an additional 26 billion dollars, enough to exceed the more than 300 billion dollars estimated byAndrew Carneggiethe steel magnate who died in 1919. Musk's fortune, however, remains far below the pharaonic riches of Mansa Musa, emperor of Mali between 1312 and 1337, who then owned most of the gold and salt reserves of the planet at the time, and whose updated level of fortune would be several thousand billion current dollars. The same could be said of Emperor Augustus, whose past fortune is now estimated at 4.6 trillion dollars.
