Elon Musk continues his meteoric rise up the charts of the world’s richest people. The Tesla and SpaceX head just passed long-time “richest guy in the world” stand-in Bill Gates for the second overall spot, with a net worth of $128 billion.

The new valuation comes as Musk’s personal fortune grew $7.2 billion in a single day on Monday, with the markets still responding to the news that Tesla stock would trade on the S&P 500. The enthusiastic purchasing of the stock ballooned Musk’s wealth due to the significant amount of shares the co-founder holds in his electric car company. That pushed him just past Gates, who holds a $127.7 billion fortune that’s significantly smaller than it could be due to Gates’ well-publicized philanthropy.

Musk became the third-richest man just a few short months ago, riding a Tesla stock split that increased the overall number of shares in circulation (and a great year for the world’s richest people in general) to pass Facebook’s, Mark Zuckerberg. Overall in 2020, Musk has had the best year among billionaires.

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His net worth has increased by over $100 billion in 2020, pushing him from just inside the top 40 richest people on Earth to his current spot looking up at Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.

Musk still has quite a climb in front of him if he wants to knock the Amazon founder out of the slot he’s held since 2017. Bezos recently became the first person ever with a net worth over $200 billion. The gap between Musk and Bezos is of a similar size of the one between a person with no money and Warren Buffett, the Berkshire Hathaway head worth over $70 billion. 

The pandemic year has boosted the economic inequality that characterizes our current age, with the world’s richest seeing massive gains while significant portions of the country’s labour force became unemployed. A report from Swedish bank UBS found the billionaire class saw their overall wealth rise by more than 25 per cent between April and July of this year.