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Elon Musk’s Rise to Riches: How quickly the Tesla CEO Climbed the Wealth List

Elon Musk custom Tesla-branded Nike shoes (Credit: DMCustomSneakers via Instagram)

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk is the Richest Person in the World. But how did he get there? It wasn’t easy, but Musk’s rise to riches was quick as Tesla climbed in market capitalization, which fueled the CEO’s net worth gain.

Musk officially passed Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos for the number 1 spot on January 7th, after Tesla’s stock surged to over $789.00 a share, sending the Tesla frontman’s net worth to astronomical levels. Musk’s net worth sat north of $190 billion at the time.

It wasn’t always that way, though. Musk and Tesla had to overcome several bottlenecks throughout the years. Lack of funding, production issues, and general challenges in starting a company were things that Tesla had to overcome. Luckily, it did. It is the most valuable car company on Earth, and it is the sixth-most valuable company ever.

However, three years ago, Musk wasn’t even close to being the richest person in the world. He only had a net worth of $19.9 billion, which was 147% shy of Bezos, who enjoyed a $131 billion fortune at the time, Uswitch data shows.

In 2020, Musk’s net worth climbed to $129.8 billion, and he passed long-standing names on the list like Buffett and Gates. Even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had fallen behind the Tesla CEO. However, Bezos and Amazon were flourishing, especially as in-store shopping had slowed and online deliveries of consumer goods grew, especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Fast forward to 2021, and Tesla has continued to surge upward. Fueled by the news of the company reaching its 500,000 vehicle delivery and production guidance that it set for 2020, the stock continued to become more expensive, only fueling Tesla’s valuation.

Tesla reaches 500,000 production and delivery goal for 2020

Now, Musk sits at the top of the list, 5.2% richer than Bezos, who held the #1 spot from 2017 to 2021.

Incredibly, Musk, who didn’t seem to give much thought to his new title, immediately went back to work as many challenges lie ahead. Tesla plans to open two new production facilities in 2021 in Texas and Germany, and the company also has plans to begin operations in India.

Tesla has become incredibly popular worldwide, and its vehicles are dominating sales figures everywhere. Data from the EV Sales Blog shows that the Model 3 is the main reason for Tesla’s global success as its affordable price point and superior EV tech continues to inspire people to switch to an EV. It was the most popular vehicle in Norway in December 2020, a country with a higher market share of EVs in 2020 than gas-powered cars. It was also China’s most popular electric vehicle, selling over 116,000 units within the first 11 months of the year.

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Moving forward, Musk’s mission hasn’t changed since his early days at Tesla. The focus still remains on accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable energy, and thanks to the company’s lineup of sustainable cars, the mission has been an overwhelming success thus far.

Joey has been a journalist covering electric mobility at TESLARATI since August 2019. In his spare time, Joey is playing golf, watching MMA, or cheering on any of his favorite sports teams, including the Baltimore Ravens and Orioles, Miami Heat, Washington Capitals, and Penn State Nittany Lions. You can get in touch with joey at joey@teslarati.com. He is also on X @KlenderJoey. If you're looking for great Tesla accessories, check out shop.teslarati.com

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Tesla Mobile App gets a new feature that wrap fans are going to love

Tesla’s Summer Update removes the USB drive step from customizing your car’s digital wrap design.

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Tesla’s latest 2026 Summer Update quietly closes out one of the more tedious steps in personalizing a Tesla’s digital appearance. Uploading a custom wrap design used to require a USB drive. Now it doesn’t.

The feature is listed in Tesla’s release notes as “Send Custom Wraps from Mobile App.” The company described it plainly: “Skip the USB drive and upload a custom wrap of your car from the mobile app. Instructions for creating a custom wrap here: github.com/teslamotors/custom-wraps.”

The digital wrap tool has been around since Tesla’s 2024 Holiday Update, when it launched for Cybertruck owners first, as Teslarati reported at the time. Getting a design onto the car meant formatting a USB drive, creating a folder named exactly “Wraps,” dropping in PNG files sized between 512×512 and 1024×1024 pixels and under 1 MB each, then plugging the drive in and applying the wrap through Toybox. Tesla expanded the tool to other models and renamed it from “Colorizer” to “Paint Shop” with the 2025 Holiday Update, while also adding license plate and window tint customization alongside the wraps.

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The latest Summer Update removes the USB step from that process. Owners will be able to pull a design from wherever they saved it, whether that’s a download from social media or something built from Tesla’s own GitHub templates, and push it to the car directly through the app.

Tesla reveals 2026 Summer Update with crazy fixes to Nav and more

It’s a small fix relative to the rest of this latest release, which also included expanded Grok voice commands, automatic navigation that learns regular routes, and self-driving stats inside the mobile app, all detailed in our rundown of the full Summer Update. The USB requirement was one of the more common complaints about Paint Shop since it launched. Tesla did not say when the wrap upload change would reach individual vehicles, only that the broader update is rolling out now in waves.

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Elon Musk

Tesla Diner is throwing a birthday party with a Franz-signed special treat

Tesla Diner turns one on July 21 with Optimus, roller skates, and a Franz-signed hat.

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Tesla is throwing its Hollywood Diner a first birthday party on July 21 and the celebration comes with a guest list of unique items, including a limited run of Tesla Diner birthday hats personally signed by Tesla Chief Designer Franz von Holzhausen for the first 50 customers who place an in-car order at midnight.

One year after lines wrapped around the block on Santa Monica Boulevard for a diner that most of the restaurant industry did not take seriously, Tesla is making the case that the concept was worth the years it took to build. The concept had been in Musk’s head since at least 2018, when he floated the idea of “an old school drive-in, roller skates and rock restaurant” on X, describing it years later as “‘Grease’ meets ‘The Jetsons’ with Supercharging.”

Tesla Optimus Gen 3 is coming to the Tesla Diner with new ambitions

 

What made the diner genuinely different from any restaurant that came before it was not the menu or the nostalgia. It was the ordering model. Tesla owners could place food orders directly from their vehicle’s touchscreen before arriving, a small feature that hints at something much larger on the horizon. As the Cybercab and unsupervised FSD expand across major cities, the diner model becomes a template for an entirely new kind of commerce. A robotaxi pulling in to charge does not need a human to walk up to a counter. The vehicle places the order, the food is ready on arrival, and the passenger never interrupts the experience of being driven somewhere else. It is the first glimpse of what drive-through commerce looks like when the car is doing the driving.

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As Teslarati has reported, Musk signaled immediately after opening that the Hollywood location was only the beginning, posting that Tesla would expand the concept to major cities worldwide and along Supercharger corridors on long-distance routes if the first location proved successful. One year in, the birthday celebration on July 21 makes a strong case that it has. Tesla announced a full day of events including a Cybercab on display, a birthday menu, Optimus in attendance, face painting, a photo booth, roller skating servers, a light show, a Skypad DJ, and complimentary collectibles.

If Musk’s ambition holds, the Hollywood diner is year one of something much bigger. The birthday party is the proof of concept. The robotaxi fleet is the business model waiting behind it.

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NTSB findings on fatal Tesla crash tell a very different story

The NTSB confirmed the driver, not Tesla’s FSD, caused the fatal Texas house crash.

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The National Transportation Safety Board released preliminary findings Wednesday confirming that a Tesla driver, not the vehicle’s software, caused a fatal crash in Katy, Texas in June. The driver, 44-year-old Michael Butler, had engaged Full Self-Driving Supervised mode on Rose Hollow Lane, a residential street with a 30 mph speed limit, before manually overriding the system by pressing the accelerator pedal all the way to 100%. Data recovered from the 2025 Tesla Model 3 showed the vehicle was traveling over 70 miles per hour when it struck a home and killed 76-year-old Martha Avila, who was inside. Weather was clear, the road was dry, and it was daylight.

Texas man charged in fatal Tesla crash where he blamed Autopilot

Butler told authorities he had passed out at the wheel. But security camera footage obtained by the NTSB told a different story, and showed the car accelerating through an intersection before leaving the road entirely. Police also found that Butler’s phone had Google searches including the terms “Tesla FSD not aggressive enough 2026” and “Tesla FSD too timid,” raising serious questions about how he was using the system before the crash. Butler has since been charged with manslaughter. The victim’s family has filed a lawsuit against both Butler and Tesla, alleging negligence.

The NTSB findings aligned directly with what Tesla VP of AI Software Ashok Elluswamy had already stated publicly on X in the weeks after the crash, writing that “the driver manually overrode self-driving by pressing the accelerator all the way to 100%.” The data confirmed his account.

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