Surprise: Elon Musk is still the richest man in the world — and his wealth has reached unprecedented levels, even as the last vestiges of Twitter crumble under his watch.
Since the start of 2023, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, the Tesla and SpaceX (and up until recently, Twitter) chief executive’s net worth has grown by more than $96 billion.
Musk is now worth $234 billion; he has gained $530 million a day in 2023. That means in a span of three days — say, in the three days since Musk introduced rate limits on Twitter and effectively restricted just how much anyone can use the site he bought for $44 billion last year — he amassed approximately $1.6 billion.
As of Saturday, most Twitter users can view only 600 tweets a day; that number goes up to 6,000 for Twitter Blue users. The reasons behind the limit — effectively reducing eyeballs on the site as Twitter struggles to win back advertisers — remain truly unclear. Musk claims that the restriction was introduced to curtail “extreme” data scraping by artificial intelligence firms, while reports float around about Twitter’s nonpayment to Google, which hosts key servers for the company.
Back to Musk’s staggering riches, seemingly in spite of himself: In 2021, when Musk was valued at $255 billion, Forbes declared him “the richest person to ever walk the planet.” For a few brief periods in the past year, the Tesla scion was not the richest guy in the world — ceding the title to LVMH co-founder and CEO Bernard Arnault, who is currently valued at a cool $200 billion, according to Bloomberg. Meta CEO (and Musk’s potential cage match combatant) Mark Zuckerberg also won big in 2023, snagging nearly $59 billion more this year even as his vision for the metaverse has all but collapsed entirely.
Rich people in and out of tech are having a great time; Bloomberg notes that this six-month stretch has been the best time for billionaires since the second half of 2020. Meanwhile, survey after survey has shown that a staggering number of Americans are experiencing stress over their finances — no doubt heightened by record inflation and, now, the Supreme Court's overruling President Joe Biden’s student loan debt forgiveness plan.
So, his website is gone to shit, his rocket blew up because he ordered the launchpad to be made on the cheap (and now they're going to hot-stage their "reusable" rocket which is going to cause the exact same refurbishment issue that ballooned space shuttle costs), his self-driving car rollout was a castrophe, and his tunnel company has drilled one tunnel that didn't meet expectations...
:thats-neat-you-dont: Actually, they're going to add more tunnels under Vegas, which an army of taxi drivers will use to move individual people up and down the strip.
private roads for rich people, hopefully similar to private submarines for rich people.
hmm, what is the drainage situation like down there and have they actually checked that it works
I like to mention that people imagined just having bands that move for pedestrians under cities in the early SciFi issues. Those were a better idea than doing tunnels and transporting people with cars that are designed for the over world (and have to have drivers!)
like the ones at airports
Yes, but usually faster. In Asimov's series about a detective and a robot (I can't for the life of me remember what it's called and I refuse to look it up), they have more or less freeways, complete with lanes for merging and signs for exits and shit, but it's all super fast moving walkways.
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Caves of Steel
Those are called marching bands.
Imagine failing at everything but still raking in billions. This system needs to be taken out back and shot.