Elon Musk’s Tesla has crossed the $1-trillion market cap after American car rental major Hertz revealed it had placed a massive order for 100,000 Tesla cars. The news sent Tesla shares rallying to over $1,045. Elon Musk saw his wealth swell by $36.2 billion to $289 billion, nearly $100 billion more than rival Jeff Bezos, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index.

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Morgan Stanley analysts had recently predicted that the Tesla CEO would become the first-ever trillionaire in the near future as valuations for his space company would rise dramatically.

Musk’s net worth has already jumped drastically since the start of 2020 following the stellar performance of Tesla stocks. The share of the electric vehicle manufacturer was less than $90 at the start of 2020, when Musk was only at $27 billion, or 10 percent of his current wealth.

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Musk, a US citizen who was born in South Africa and later studied in Canada, has led multiple successful ventures since a young age. The son of a supermodel and a diamond mine owner, Musk had learned how to code by himself, and at age 12 he sold his first program -- a computer game called Blastar.

In 1995, Musk and his brother Kimbal, who is on the boards of SpaceX and Tesla, launched their first venture. The 20-something siblings created Zip2, an online city travel guide that was soon providing content for organisations like the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. The company was bought by Compaq Computer Corporation for nearly $350 million.

Four years later, Kimbal and Musk used some of the money from the sale of Zip2 to form X.com, an online financial services and payments company. Within a year, X.com acquired further assets and evolved to PayPal. The company was later bought by eBay.com for $1.5 billion in stock, of which Musk received nearly 10 percent.

Musk then founded SpaceX in 2002 after realising that he could significantly cut down the cost of space travel by using vertical integration, cheap commercial off-the-shelf components when possible, and modular engineering. While the company struggled in its early years, it became the first private organisation to send a liquid-propellant rocket to orbit in 2008.

Now, SpaceX has emerged as a major private contender for various space exploration projects, including future missions to Mars and the Moon, while also being awarded several lucrative NASA contracts.

Musk joined Tesla in 2004 as a Series A investor and became the chairman. After a lawsuit with founders Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, who were the CEO and CFO at the time respectively, Musk could call himself one of the co-founders as well.

Initially involved with product design, Musk later led Tesla to go public in 2010 with backing from Daimler and Toyota. It became only the second American car manufacturer after Ford to go public, and in 2017 overtook General Motors as the most valuable vehicle maker in the US.

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Tesla has emerged as a leader in electric vehicle manufacturing even as the company plans to expand its portfolio of EVs to commercial vehicles. The company’s expansion comes at a time when there is a greater impetus to switch to EVs amid growing concerns over climate crisis, further driving growth and making future prospects extremely bullish.

(Edited by : Shoma Bhattacharjee)