Elon Musk overtakes Bill Gates to become world's second-richest person with net worth of $127.9 bn

Tesla chief Elon Musk on Monday overtook Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to becomes the second-richest person in the world. This came as the Musk's net worth soared $7.2 billion to $127.9 billion, driven by a surge in the company's shares. With the latest spike, Musk has added a total of $100.3 billion to his net worth this year, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index. 

His net worth is mostly comprised of Tesla shares that are valued more than four times his stake in SpaceX. Gates was the world’s richest man for years before being overtaken by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. He now finds himself on the third spot in the list.  

Elon Musk and Bill Gates have occasionally engaged in verbal spats. Recently, Elon Musk had ridiculed Bill Gates, saying the latter doesn't know about electric cars. While responding to a question on Bill Gates's "declarations" on electric trucks, Elon Musk said, "He has no clue." 

In a separate development, Musk has accused Chinese electric car maker Xpeng of stealing the old source codes of his electric vehicle maker company. Musk even alleged that Xpeng stole Apple`s code too. 

In a chat with one of his followers on Twitter who asked why is Xpeng using LiDAR technology which is a big deviation from copying Tesla, Musk replied: "They have an old version of our software & don`t have our NN inference computer". He continued: "They stole Apple`s code too". 

In July 2019, Guangzhi Cao, a former engineer at Tesla admitted to uploading Tesla`s Autopilot source code to his iCloud account. Tesla sued Cao for allegedly giving the secret code to Xpeng. Tesla does not use the LiDAR sensor technology and relies on deep neural networks. Xpeng is using LiDAR which is different from what Tesla is using in its vehicles. Apple uses the LiDAR technology in its new iPhone 12 lineup for immersive and enhanced AR experiences.