Billionaire Elon Musk, already the world's richest person, is approaching an unprecedented milestone as he is nearly halfway to becoming the planet's first trillionaire, Forbes magazine reported Wednesday.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO became the first person to briefly achieve a net worth of $500 billion, as the shares in his electric vehicle company rebounded from his stint in politics, amid other gains.
The 54-year-old's net worth reached $500.1 billion on Wednesday before dipping back to $499.1 billion, according to the publication's "Real-Time Billionaires" tracker.
Ranked after him on the Forbes list are Oracle founder Larry Ellison, with a net worth of $350.7 billion and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, with a net worth of $245.8 billion.
After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania and dropping out of Stanford University, Musk banked his first millions when he sold an online publishing software company to U.S. computer maker Compaq for more than $300 million in 1999.
His next company eventually merged with PayPal. After leaving that venture, the South African-born tech entrepreneur founded the space rocket company SpaceX in 2002 and became the chairperson of electric carmaker Tesla in 2004.
