Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos are now worth almost half a trillion dollars

The combined net worth of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos approached $500 billion Wednesday, fueled by the unrelenting rally in Tesla Inc. shares and a broad surge in tech stocks that sent the Nasdaq 100 to an intraday record.

The value of the two fortunes — a sum bigger than the market value of Johnson & Johnson and about equal to that of America’s biggest bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co. — is yet another watershed moment in what’s shaping up to be a historic week for billionaires.

Musk, co-founder of publicly traded Tesla and closely held rocket company SpaceX, has added $122.3 billion to his fortune this year, pushing his net worth to $292 billion, according to the Bloomberg index. Amazon.com Inc. founder Bezos is worth $196.3 billion.

The 10 richest Americans, including Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, are worth a total of $1.4 trillion, according to the index.

Musk’s wealth has ballooned partly because he hasn’t sold any of his Tesla stock for years, instead tapping banks for loans using his stake in the electric vehicle maker as collateral. Pledging shares is a way to monetize equity without actually selling it.

Musk has $515 million in personal loans from Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Bank of America Corp., according to a regulatory filing from December 2020, the most recent one available with this information.