His entrepreneurial journey began with the payment service provider PayPal: After further foundings and a lot of fuss, Elon Musk is considered the richest man in the world.

Thanks to the rising Tesla valuation, the Bloomberg news agency now counts his fortune at $ 302 billion - no other person on earth has that much.

After all, it's $ 100 billion more than runner-up Jeff Bezos, who comes in at $ 199 billion with his Amazon business.

For Musk's fortune today, his stake in Tesla is most important.

The share price of the electric car manufacturer has just risen again significantly in the past few days and came to more than $ 1,000.

Its market cap exceeded $ 1 trillion this week.

Musk has just turned 50.

He was born on June 28, 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa.

His father is the South African mechanical engineer Errol and his mother is the Canadian-born model Maye Musk.

At the age of 17, he moved to Canada and founded the software company Zip2 with his brother Kimbal in 1995, which Compaq acquired four years later for $ 307 million.

That was the first cornerstone.

Musk then founded his next company, which is still in use today as an online payment service under the name PayPal.

There are more Silicon Valley names associated with PayPal.

Peter Thiel, who invested in Facebook, and Reid Hoffmann, who co-founded LinkedIn, were also involved.

They all benefited from the Internet auction house Ebay buying Paypal for $ 1.5 billion in 2002.

Musk received around $ 200 million for his stake, which he put into his other endeavors.

In 2002, Musk founded the space company SpaxeX and invested $ 100 million in it.

In 2020, the company will bring American astronauts to the international space station ISS and, more recently, space tourists into orbit on a three-day flight.

However, it became far better known with the rise of the electric car manufacturer Tesla, which initially and later continued to make losses.

Musk invested here in 2003 and moved to the top of the company as CEO in 2008.

In terms of market capitalization, Tesla is now the most valuable car manufacturer in the world, has firmly anchored electric drives in the industry and is currently building a large plant in Grünheide in Germany.

Musk also puts out his feelers in other entrepreneurial activities: in 2006 he co-founded the solar company SolarCity, which was largely bought up by Tesla ten years later.

He promotes the use of high-speed trains called "Hyperloop" and also invested in the non-profit company Open Ai, which is supposed to research artificial intelligence and its risks.

At the top, Bloomberg's wealth ranking is shaped by the tech billionaires in America: Bezos is in second place with 199 billion dollars, ahead of Bernard Arnault with 168 billion dollars, Microsoft founder Bill Gates with 135 billion dollars and the two Google Founder Larry Page with $ 129 billion and Sergey Brin with $ 125 billion.

Behind are Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg with 118 billion dollars, long-time Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer with 116 billion dollars and Oracle founder Larry Ellison with 115 billion dollars and the American investor Warren Buffett with 105 billion dollars.

The American Musk directs both Tesla and SpaceX as CEO.

His wealth is now as high as 1.44 percent of America's economic output, according to Bloomberg.