Elon Musk has overtaken Amazon's Jeff Bezos as the world's richest person, with his net worth passing the $185 billion (£136 billion) mark yesterday.

This was a result of a 5 per cent jump in the share price of Musk's Tesla electric car company.

This put his personal value $1.5bn ahead of Bezos.

Tesla hit a market value of $700 billion, despite the firm only recently making its first ever annual profit.

Besides Tesla, Musk heads rocket company SpaceX and Neuralink, which is working on high bandwidth machine interfaces to connect human brains to computers.

On Twitter, Musk reacted to the news in his usual dry style: “How strange. Well, back to work...”

Bezos has been the world's richest man since 2017, and may well have held onto the spot if his divorce settlement hadn't included 4 per cent of Amazon being handed to his ex-wife, after their split in April 2019.

Musk's total wealth has perhaps been boosted by the Democrats winning last year's election, as they are more committed to a green agenda than outgoing president Trump, with Musk's electric cars set to benefit.

That said, Bezos' Amazon is continuing to benefit from high demand for home deliveries and its cloud services during the pandemic.

Trump also dislikes Bezos for his ownership of the Washington Post - a critic of his presidency - so Bezos may or not benefit under president-elect Biden, providing big tech critics among the Democrats are reined in.

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