There are now 14 people worth over R1 trillion – including a Pretorian

It has been a momentous week for the mega-billionaires of this world. Two enormous milestones were breached by both Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk – the latter of which has seen his stock rise tremendously in August. The Pretoria-born tech-whizz has long been part of the ‘R1 trillion club’ – and he now has more company.

R1 trillion converted: US Dollar to South African Rand exchange rate for Thursday 27 August

Whatever your feelings on the matter, this hasn’t been a bad pandemic for the richest people in our society. Eight of the global top ten are better off now than they were this time last year. The cohort of people now worth over R1 trillion has grown, and as the rand weakens, it opens the floodgates for the list to expand.

At the time of writing this article, the US Dollar to Rand (ZAR) exchange rate stood at $1 : R16.90. That means that you would need to have at least $59.219 billion in the bank to break the R1 trillion mark. We’re going to look at who makes the grade soon, but first, there have been two truly outstanding developments:

What is Jeff Bezos’ net worth?

Ladies and gentlemen, we have our first $200 billion dollar citizen. Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, has seen his personal fortune grow by $87 billion in the past 12 months, taking his net worth to $202 billion in total. There are absolutely no pay-day fears in this guy’s house, that’s for sure.

How much is Elon Musk worth?

Only one man has experienced a financial boom anything like Bezos’ in 2020, and that’s Elon Musk. His work with Tesla and SpaceX has brought him into the ‘centi-billionaires club’ – becoming only the fourth person in history to achieve this. Now worth $101 billion, he is unquestionably the richest businessman born in SA.

List of people worth R1 trillion or more

• All information taken from the Bloomberg Billionaires Index

Name	Wealth in US Dollars	Wealth in SA Rand (ZAR)
Jeff Bezos	$202 billion (bn)	R3.41 trillion (tr)
Bill Gates	$124bn	R2.09tr
Mark Zuckerberg	$115bn	R1.94tr
Elon Musk	$101bn	R1.7tr
Bernard Arnault	$86bn	R1.45tr
Warren Buffett	$81.2bn	R1.37tr
Mukesh Ambani	$81.1bn	R1.36tr
Steve Ballmer	$79.3bn	R1.34tr
Larry Page	$77.9bn	R1.31tr
Sergey Brin	$75.5bn	R1.29tr
Larry Ellison	$68.8bn	R1.16tr
Francoise Myers	$66.7bn	R1.12tr
Mackenzie Scott	$66.2bn	R1.11tr
Amancio Ortega	$59.9bn	R1.01tr