What Is Elon Musk's Net Worth? Find Out the Astonishing Wealth of the Tech CEO From the dot-com bubble to SpaceX, the tech mogul and CEO is the richest person in the world.

This article originally appeared on Business Insider.

Elon Musk, the world's richest person, has a net worth of around $239 billion, according to estimates by Bloomberg.

But the tech mogul's wealth comes from a number of sources and it isn't stable. His fortunes have fluctuated greatly since the start of the pandemic, and he's been trading places with other tech billionaires to top Bloomberg's rich list.

How has Musk's net worth changed over time?

Musk, who was born in South Africa, moved to Canada, and dropped out of a Ph.D at Stanford, became a millionaire before he hit 30. Musk started Zip2, a website that provided city travel guides to newspapers, with his brother Kimbal Musk, and sold it to Compaq for more than $300 million in 1999. Musk, then aged 27, is believed to have got $22 million from the deal.

He went on to cofound online bank X.com in 1999. It soon merged with Peter Thiel's Confinity to become PayPal, and the company was bought for $1.5 billion by eBay in 2002. Despite having been ousted as CEO, Musk walked away with around $165 million.

Musk cofounded space-exploration company SpaceX in 2002. In 2004, he became an investor in and chairman of EV company Tesla. During the financial crisis in 2008, he saved Tesla from bankruptcy with a $40 million investment and a $40 million loan. That same year, he was named CEO.

Musk said 2008 was "the worst year of my life." Alongside problems in his personal life, Tesla kept losing money and SpaceX was having trouble launching its Falcon 1 rocket. By 2009, Musk was living off personal loans.

But Tesla went public in 2010, and Musk's estimated net worth steadily climbed. In 2012 he debuted on Forbes' Billionaires List with an estimated wealth of $2 billion.

In 2016, Musk set up tunnel-digging business the Boring Company. The next year, he founded neurotechnology startup Neuralink.

Musk's net worth began a rapid ascent at the start of the pandemic as Tesla shares soared. Musk started 2020 with an estimated net worth of just under $30 billion and was worth around $170 billion just a year later – a more than five-fold increase in just a year. His estimated fortune peaked at around $340 billion in November 2021.

He also bought Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022, serving as its CEO until he stood down in early June.

Though Bloomberg puts his current net worth at $239 billion, Forbes puts it at $242.4 billion.

Where does Musk's fortune come from?

Musk's wealth is largely dependent on Tesla shares. Though he takes no salary from Tesla, he's awarded stock options when the company hits challenging performance metrics.

"Elon will receive no guaranteed compensation of any kind — no salary, no cash bonuses, and no equity that vests simply by the passage of time," Tesla said in 2018 when the company announced a 10-year performance award for Musk. "Instead, Elon's only compensation will be a 100% at-risk performance award, which ensures that he will be compensated only if Tesla and all of its shareholders do extraordinarily well."

According to Bloomberg, close to half of Musk's net worth comes from Tesla shares, while just over 20% comes from SpaceX shares. The rest of his wealth comes from shares in Twitter and The Boring Company, as well as other miscellaneous liabilities.

How does Musk stack up to other billionaires?

At time of writing, Musk was the world's richest person, according to Bloomberg's estimates, though he frequently trades places with other billionaires.

Musk's current fortune is around $38 billion larger than that of LVMH founder Bernard Arnault, who Bloomberg estimates is worth $201 billion. Rounding off the top five are Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, at $153 billion, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, at $137 billion, and Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, at $133 billion.