Elon Musk topped the rankings with $ 273.5 billion in assets and a 75% gain thanks to investors’ bet on Tesla’s green cars. The visionary entrepreneur ousted Amazon founder Jeff Bezos from the podium, who fell to second place with $ 194.2 billion because the e-commerce and cloud giant rose only 2% compared to 2020. Behind him, the French Bernard Arnault, the patron of the luxury giant LVMH, with a fortune of 177.1 billion dollars: the shares of his empire grew by 55% last year, also thanks to important investments such as the 15 billion dollars spent at the end 2020 to take over Tiffany. Bill Gates slips into fourth position, with an estimated assets of 138.3 billion dollars: they weighed the divorce from Melinda, which forced him to sell a slice of Microsoft shares to his wife, and a growth of the company only 5%. Sixth Mark Zuckerberg, the patron of Meta-Facebook, with 128.4 billion (and + 24% compared to 2020), preceded by Larry Page, founder of Alphabet-Google, who at the end of the year had a net worth of 129.5 billion dollars, up 57%.
Musk also records for taxes
Musk, however, also hits another record: he will pay over $ 11 billion in taxes this year, the heaviest check ever paid to the Internal Revenue Service by a single individual in American history. The announcement of Tesla’s patron is entrusted to a short tweet in response to the rain of criticism, especially from the Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren, for the few taxes paid by the US scroungers. Musk receives no compensation or cash bonuses for his role as Tesla CEO. And the amount it owes to the stars and stripes tax is linked to having exercised what 15 million options and having sold millions of shares to cover transaction taxes. Musk’s strong sales of Tesla stocks are in part linked to the outcome of the poll he conducted on Twitter in recent months, in which he asked followers whether or not he should sell 10% of the electric car giant’s shares. ,. The majority of respondents answered yes, paving the way for the sale of securities. Even without the survey, observers and skeptics say, Musk would have found himself paying billions in taxes on stock options expiring next year: exercising them now instead of in August 2022 may even have favored Musk by imposing a tax rate on him. lower than what Democrats want for the super rich. According to ProPublica revelations, Musk paid zero federal income taxes in 2018 and only paid $ 455 million to the tax authorities for the previous four years despite his wealth having multiplied. Musk is the richest man in the world with an estimated fortune of $ 243 billion, more than the $ 195 billion of Jeff Bezos, his rival in the race to conquer space.
The richest in Italy
Among the Italians, the Ferrero family is confirmed first with assets of 35.9 billion, in 37th position worldwide. Leonardo Del Vecchio is 39th instead with 34.5 billion. The other super rich people of Italy in the top 500 are far behind: the Rocca family is 204th with 11.1 billion, Silvio Berlusconi is 301th with 8.77 billion, Miuccia Prada is 477th with 5.93 billion and Patrizio Bertelli 479th with 5 , 91 billion. In just one year, Bloomberg reports, the wealth of the 500 richest people in the country has grown by 1,000 billion for a total of 8,400 billion. A figure that exceeds the combined global GDP net of the US and China. The wealth of the top 10 in the ranking is close to 1,500 billion in total.