Mark Zuckerberg Is Almost $54 Billion Richer This Year — and He's Closing in on Elon Musk It's only March, but Facebook's founder is already much wealthier this year.

^{This article originally appeared on Business Insider.}

Mark Zuckerberg has become a lot wealthier this year 2024 — and is closing in on his would-be cage-fight rival Elon Musk for the title of the world's third-richest person.

The Meta CEO's fortune has surged by almost $54 billion since the start of January, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

As of Friday's closing bell, he was worth $182 billion — just $7 billion behind Musk. Zuckerberg hasn't been richer than the Tesla CEO since November 2020.

Zuckerberg derives most of his wealth from his 13% stake in Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Its shares have surged 43% this year partly due to Zuck's "year of efficiency" cost-cutting measures.

In contrast, Musk's own net worth has plummeted by $40 billion. While Meta and several other "Magnificent Seven" tech stocks have climbed higher, Tesla has tumbled 29%. It's been dragged down by investors' worries about a slowdown in global demand for its electric vehicles.

Tesla is "supposed to be a high-growth stock, and the short answer is that this year it looks like it won't be that high growth," Seth Goldstein, an equity strategist at Morningstar, told Business Insider. "When growth there is slowing, we tend to see a big reaction from the market."

LVMH chief Bernard Arnault and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have both overtaken Musk on the Bloomberg index this year.

Musk and Zuckerberg both made efforts to play up their rivalry last year. Zuckerberg took several swipes at the Tesla CEO after Meta launched Threads as a potential competitor to X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter that Musk bought for $44 billion in October 2022.

At one point, the two billionaires even promised to settle their differences in a cage match, although it appears unlikely that is ever going to happen.