Tesla (TSLA  ) Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk, based on recent estimates, surpassed Amazon (AMZN  ) Jeff Bezos for the top spot as world's richest man, with a net worth of approximately $188 billion, according to Bloomberg News. Musk is now estimated to be $1.5 million richer than what Bezos is worth.

Musk's heightened wealth comes as Tesla shares of soared throughout 2020 and into the new year, bringing the company's market valuation ahead of Facebook's (FB  ) after market close on Friday at $820 billion. This makes Tesla the fifth-largest company in the large-cap benchmark, with the electric carmaker only trailing behind Apple (AAPL  ), Microsoft (MSFT  ), Amazon (AMZN  ) and Alphabet (GOOG  ).

However, other analysts at Forbes, which give a more conservative estimate, put Musk still behind Bezos by about $7.8 million. Although sources differ on whether Tesla remains in the lead when it comes to the market valuations of Musk and Bezos, the outlook for Tesla and CEO Elon Musk as a whole seems optimistic in terms of future stock.

Musk reacted to his new net worth estimation on Twitter (TWTR  ), which is something he has been known to do. Musk replied, "How strange," to a tweet from Tesla Owners of Silicon Valley writing "Elon Musk is now the richest person in the world at $190 billion.

Musk followed up his reply, tweeting: "Well, back to work..."

Whether or not he is the richest person on earth, The Guardian estimates that Musk's amount of wealth goes beyond that of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, thus making him at least the world's second richest person.

Musk in the past has not had making money as the primary goal behind his business ventures. In the past, Musk has tweeted: "You should ask why I would want money. The reason is not what you think. Very little time for recreation. Don't have vacation homes or yachts or anything like that."

"About half my money is intended to help problem on Earth & half to help establish a self-sustaining city on Mars to ensure continuation of life (of all species) in case Earth gets hit by a meteor like the dinosaurs or WW3 happens & we destroy ourselves."

In a very short amount of time, Musk rose to the top, and it turned into the first $100 billion listed United States carmakers in January 2019. The stock also skyrocketed over 700% in 2020 and continues to gain momentum moving into 2021 as the company begins to launch lower cost consumer models like the recent Model Y SUV.

Whether or not Musk is truly the richest man in the world, he is nevertheless creating a high amount of competition in the business world. Tesla as a company is likely to continue to grow and to thrive successfully, as well as Musk's other private ventures like SpaceX and The Boring Company.