Elon’s Bitcoin bet hands Jeff Bezos back title of world’s richest person
Elon Musk is now merely the second richest person alive, after the eccentric entrepreneur’s Tesla ploughed $1.5bn dollars into Bitcoin, which has plummeted in value in recent days.
Tesla’s share price has fallen around 25 per cent from its peak, amid sell-off of high-flying technology stocks.
Tesla’s fall was compounded still by the fall in Bitcoin, which tumbled from an all-time high of $55,000 per Bitcoin, to just under $46,000 at the time of writing.
A Germany-based trader said he was “taking chips off the table” on Tesla as its $1.5 billion investment in the cryptocurrency could “backfire now.”
Tesla began 2020 priced at about $85 per share, but reached the $900 mark on 25 January. The Tesla boom initially crowned Musk the richest person alive, overtaking Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in the process.
When he became the richest person alive, Musk had a fortune of more than $188.5bn, at the time some £1.5bn more than Bezos.
Space X raises $850m in equity financing
Away from Tesla, Musk’s other company Space X has raised about $850m in equity financing, according to a regulatory filing.
The private space company had raised $1.9bn in August in its largest single fundraising round, according to financial software and data provider PitchBook.
The latest round reportedly lifted the valuation of the company, of which investors include Alphabet and Fidelity Investments, to about $74bn.