Elon Musk has been making headlines all year round, whether that’s because he became the richest person in the world, TIME’s person of the year, or providing Ukraine with a Starlink communication system.
Well, now he’s making headlines for confirming that messages between him and Bill Gates are legitimate.
Scroll on to find out more.
Now, Elon Musk is the complete embodiment of a classic eccentric billionaire…
Being the founder, CEO, and Chief Engineering Designer of not only Tesla but SpaceX too, he has an awful lot going for him.
As it currently stands, Tesla is the world’s leading electric car company…
With almost 500,000 vehicles being bought and distributed in 2020 alone. The company is pioneering the future of electric car travel with Musk as its CEO.
And then there’s Space X…
Space X became the first private company to successfully launch, orbit, and recover a spacecraft, as well as the first to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS).
And due to his acomplishments, Musk has cashed in a serious amount of money since starting his businesses…
Back in January, according to the BBC, Musk finally became the richest man in the world, knocking Jeff Bezos out of 1st place.
Quite the achievement, I know!
However, the feud between Musk and Bezos has been ongoing all year, with the pair yoyo-ing between 1st and 2nd place.
Well, until recently that is…
Musk saw a jump of 4.9 percent for the stock price of Tesla at the start of the year – an increase that came just days after finishing the first trading session of the year where they saw an increase of 3.4 percent.
Musk’s net worth subsequently soared shortly after to a staggering $188 billion, as per Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index.
And with Jeff Bezos’ net worth standing at $187 billion, Elon Musk was ultimately placed as the world’s richest man.
Things just kept getting better for Musk, and as of September 7th, he was reportedly worth over $200 billion…
Making him the 3rd person in the world to ever reach that milestone, behind Jeff Bezos and Bernard Arnault, CEO of French luxury brands Moët, Hennessy and Louis Vuitton.
A great achievement for Musk!
And of course, he went about the news in the most typical “Elon Musk” way.
In response to the news, he simply tweeted, “How strange”…
Before adding, “Well back to work.”
Then, almost a month after beating Bezos and becoming the world’s richest man…
He secured his position in 1st place.
On Monday, October 25th, Musk left his competitors in the dust as he reportedly gained a further $36 million…
Taking him up to a whopping $269 billion according to Forbes.
However, all this money seems to be going to his head, quite literally, as his new haircut has become the latest topic of conversation among Twitter users…
And he’s been facing some serious criticism…
Despite being crowned the richest man in the world, it hasn’t all been sunshine and rainbows for the CEO…
This year alone, he has split from his long-time girlfriend Grimes, as well as having to pay up for some unpaid taxes due to unrealized gains in Tesla stock. So all in all, it’s been a choppy year.
Now, Elon really did make the headlines an awful lot last year.
And it was always in celebration of his success.
He started this year off right, too. The $11 billion in taxes he paid have definitely been a thing of the past for him because he almost tripled what he paid in 2021, and it was only the beginning of 2022.
How? You might ask…
It’s all down to his Tesla company.
In 2021, Tesla manufactured 936,000 vehicles, allowing for a rise in stock prices, as per LADbible.
And to put his riches into perspective…
By Musk paying $11 billion in taxes last year, he gave 0.0036 percent of his earnings away. Yep, it might make you want to cry yourself to sleep, but that’s the truth.
And now, Bill Gates has issued a warning to the world about Elon Musk.
Shining a very different type of light on him.
In a Bloomberg Technology interview last year, Bill Gates commented on the Bitcoin investments Musk is making.
In the interview, the reporter said that Musk could potentially make more money from his Bitcoin investments than with his electric cars in all of 2020, and then she asked for Bill’s opinion on the matter.
“Elon has tons of money and he’s very sophisticated so I don’t worry that his Bitcoin will randomly go up or down,” he began.
“I do think people get brought into these manias who may not have as much money to spare so I’m not bullish on Bitcoin.
“My general thought would be if you have less money than Elon you should probably watch out,” he continued on.
“There are things we invest in in society that produce output. Bitcoin happens to use a lot of energy, it happens to promote anonymous transactions, they’re not reversible transactions,” he said.
He does encourage the move toward digital money, saying eventually that they will reach poorer countries, but, doesn’t believe Bitcoin is all the rave, apparently.
So, Bill Gates essentially gave everybody a friendly reminder that if you don’t have the money to gamble with in the first place…
It’s probably best not to invest in Bitcoin.
And the feud between Gates and Musk has just gone one step further.
A series of alleged texts between Musk and Gates were shared online before being confirmed as legitimate by Musk himself.
The four screenshots were shared by EV news channel Whole Mars Catalog.
In the screenshots, Gates asks Musk if he would like to discuss philanthropic opportunities, to which Musk replies asking if Gates still has ‘a half billion dollar short position against Tesla?’
Gates replied that he was sorry but that he did indeed has a ‘half billion short position against Tesla’.
That’s when Musk told him:
“Sorry, but I cannot take your philanthropy on climate change seriously when you have a massive short position against Tesla, the company doing the most to solve climate change.”
Initially the screenshots were unverified, until Musk himself tweeted that they were real.
When asked if the messages were genuine, Musk tweeted:
“Yeah, but I didn’t leak it to NYT. They must have got it through friends of friends. I heard from multiple people at TED that Gates still had half billion short against Tesla, which is why I asked him, so it’s not exactly top secret.”
Well.