Elon Musk Just Got Richer By $15 Billion In An Hour! How Did This Happen?

Elon Musk has broken more than just records. The founder of Tesla and SpaceX has become the third-richest person alive, according to Bloomberg’s calculations, leaping past Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is worth $115 billion.

The breaking news covers that a $15 Billion Record Set By Elon Musk is surprising people!  His stock holdings will now make the 46-year-old Canadian the world’s third richest man, Bloomberg reported Friday morning following a flurry of trading activity on Thursday evening that brought Musk’s net worth up by $15 billion in an hour amid Tesla’s inclusion in the S&P 500 index. He is now worth approximately $280 billion, above Bill Gates ($137.3 billion) and Jeff Bezos ($197 billion).

The rocket maker’s big move came after a volatile day in the stock market. The company inched up from $264.03 to $270.7 in an hour on Thursday before settling back to $261.68, according to Nasdaq data, as the company’s shares continued to rise and fall.

The stock rose 2.6 percent—besting the overall market’s 1 percent advance—after Tesla announced plans to acquire SolarCity Corp., one of Musk’s other companies he founded in his younger days. The announcement came hours after Tesla reported better-than-expected earnings results, sending its stock up 12 percent Wednesday night.0, with Musk’s stake jumping from about $11 billion to about $13 billion as of early Friday morning.

SpaceX, which Musk founded in 2002 and catapulted into the aerospace industry by landing private contracts for national security launches, will now hold a 5 percent stake in S&P 500 companies such as Netflix Inc., according to an S&P spokesman. Musk remains the largest shareholder in the space company with a 42 percent stake.

“It’s really good that companies that are changing the world and are very mission-driven can be embraced by the market,” Musk said in an interview earlier this week with CBS This Morning host Gayle King. “This is really important to the economy and to people living on this planet.”

While Musk hasn’t had as much fun as he did at a South African wine festival last year, he is still doing fine for himself.

“I’m not a normal person,” Musk told King in his interview. “I think I am quite strange. When people first meet me, they think I’m odd. In fact, some people have told me that. So, maybe I am an odd person and some of the behavior is an act…a show that makes it more likely that people will want to hire you or be associated with you in other ways.”

Musk also won’t be giving up his day job at Tesla and SpaceX, despite the company’s efforts to push for Mars colonization through its interplanetary rocket, the Falcon Heavy.

“I don’t think anyone realistically wants Elon to stop working on his core mission with SpaceX and Tesla,” said Brian Portell, research director at ARK Investment Management. “And that does not appear to be changing.”

He made it clear in a June blog post that he would remain chief executive officer of both companies “for the foreseeable future.” Musk told King he has no intention of stopping work on those other two companies anytime soon.